Build Better Characters: The psychology of backstory & how to use it in your writing to hook readers (Creative Academy Guides for Writers) Paperback – October 15, 2019

I already has my characters and plotline planned for a while, but gave this a read after a hiatus to see if I could improve my original plan and I really think it helped! It had fantastic insight into the psychology of characters and how to not only make them flawed and interesting but how to guide them to change through the eyes of how counselors evaluate and help their clients. The question prompts gave me hours of work evaluating exactly how my character's minds worked and how best to go about their transformation over the course of the story, even when I thought I had most of that figured out already. I'm also neurodivergent myself so having extra insight into how other brains work in general is always helpful. Great, helpful read that I highly recommend!

This was a fascinating read with tons of great tips for creating multi-dimensional characters with believable faults and complications. Includes lots of excellent examples too. I can't wait to put what I learned to work!

I bought this for my son in prison who is interested in keeping his mind busy and is learning about creating stories. He said it was a very interesting and good book and I chose well. I can't really give more of a review than that since I did not read it myself.

Easy to understand with lots of examples for applying the information given to characters in your book. The exercises are interesting and useful during all writing phases. I used them to work flesh out the main character in a project I working on as I read through the book.I can see myself coming back and using the book to help during edits.

Good book on creating round characters as opposed to flat ones. Recommended.

An amazing book! Lots of knowledge is shared within this novel. It can be used as quick referral or you can power through and read the whole book. Either way it has great information for authors at any level. Well done.

I really enjoyed how in-depth the information in the book was, and the Your Turn questions were fantastic for helping me flesh out my characters. The questions are also compiled in the back of the book all together which is super convenient.

Fantastic book filled to the brim with helpful information. I like to highlight as I read and I basically highlighted the entire book.