Inside The Cover
Book Reviews
Review by Theresa Schwegel
Breathing Life Into Your Characters
By Rachel Ballon, Ph.D.
Writers Digest Books
October 2003
242 pp.
Writing-related
Amazon.com price: $16.09
In her book Breathing Life Into Your Characters: How to Give Your Characters Emotional and Psychological
Depth, Rachel Ballon Ph.D. uses her expertise in the field of psychology to help writers pinpoint motives behind their own madness. By examining our own lives, she says, we can develop unique fictional characters. Ballon offers numerous writing exercises and techniques to help writers get in touch with themselves, and therefore their characters: from dream journaling to confronting painful memories, writers are in for some serious self-examination, if nothing else.
In addition to exercises, Ballon provides in-depth lessons about psychological behaviors, motivations, and actions. She peppers the text with famous quotes and examples from well-known books and films. She covers everything from dysfunctional family systems to childhood memories to schizophrenia, and links each subject to the writer’s life, and the writer’s quest to create deep characters (check out the chapter on villains—you haven’t created that bad guy out of thin air). Ballon aims to offer insight to why people act the way they do—but it’s up to the writer to mesh her observations with their own lives, and ultimately their characters’ lives.
Ballon has been a psychotherapist and writing consultant in L.A. for more than 20 years (she makes her credentials effusively clear in her acknowledgements and introduction). Through her career, she has worked with screenwriters and psychopaths, with novelists and with agoraphobics. The common thread among them: the need to understand themselves. For writers, work comes from the inside out, and if you aren’t in touch with yourself, you can’t create characters who are.
Much of the information Ballon presents is textbook; as in life, it’s the application that will be tricky. If you’ve yet to start writing your novel or screenplay, this book will give you plenty of reasons to procrastinate (and writing exercises to last you through a mid-life crisis). If you’ve already started writing, and made a significant dent in your story, this book may bring up issues you hadn’t anticipated (why does my killer insist upon killing beautiful young women? What, in my own background, compels me to include the gory details?). If you’re in the re-write stages, this book might be right up your dark alley. The key: you must be willing to examine your characters as a part of yourself. You’re not only writing what you know, you’re figuring out why you’re writing it—and that might be an unexpected revelation.
Ballon encourages writers to draw from their experiences and how they felt about them. Your characters are as unique as each person you know; why not infuse your fictional friends with real-life attributes? The way to deepen a character is to ask yourself questions. The answers may not appear in your text, but they will give your characters character.
In contrast to writing based on your experience, Ballon often points out the things “audiences” want to see (perhaps this is the Hollywood slant: we want the character to be real but also heroic and interesting and, of course, very pretty). Such is the writer’s struggle: to seek truth, but also book sales. With
Breathing Life Into Your Characters, Ballon balances the two like a pro.
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Theresa Schwegel is a freelance writer who just completed her first novel. A graduate of Loyola University Chicago, she holds a Masters degree in screenwriting from Chapman University.
