The Writer's Digest Sourcebook for Building Believable Characters isn't about building believable characters. Instead, it's a hodgepodge of elements of character description.
It has one chapter on dialog, written in a Question & Answer format with six authors providing the answers. The second chapter is a questionnaire about your character, his appearance, his likes and dislikes. There's a chapter with some words in various languages in case you want to throw in a "Oui" or "Bitte", but not enough to let you use a complete phrase; another chapter lists given names and surnames by nationality, in case you didn't know that Aleksandr Popov sounds Russian and Wu Ya-chun does not. Most of the rest is a set of descriptors for character traits and appearances--for instance, under "eye color" you get a list of synonyms for "green" and "blue", for "hair style" you get things like "ducktail" and "French braid."
If you want that sort of thing and can't check this out from the library, I suppose it'd be worth the Used $2.73 price. If you want insight into creating a character's psychology and internal conflict, look elsewhere.
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1 comment:
Reminds me of the sort of checklist I use as a GM to get a 'first glance' impression of a character, rather than something to understand the deeper motivations and thought process, which is more a study of psychology and the character's psyche-shaping events.
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