Review: 2 1/2 Stars for the Shadow Room Exercise
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 01 24, 2014
I bought this on my Kindle, but wrote a review on my laptop.Create a Character Clinic looked like an interesting book to read and maybe something which would help me add depth to my characters and the fictional world in my books. I bought this because I had success after reading the first exercise in the sample. It's not often that happens to me and I thought it was a good omen, so I decided to buy even though the book is very expensive. At approximately $10, it's not something that easily fits into the budget.I saw my characters more clearly, and surprisingly, they were slightly different to how I imagined after I completed the first exercise. Which is probably the reason I couldn't get a grip on them in the first place. But I did see them. So I printed out the worksheets--you have to become a member of Holly Lisle's website which is free and then hunt though different links for the worksheets. I did download the mp3, but I didn't find that any better than reading the exercise in the book. Finding the worksheets wasn't as easy as I assumed it would be, I was taken to some dead pages a few times. Then I tried to do my character's shadow room exercise while listening to the mp3. The mp3 did help a little, but I liked reading the exercise, too.For the worksheets, you have to print out about 21 pages, and I haven't read through it all yet. I'm one of those writers who if I try to fill in a character's chart too much, I don't want to write them anymore. So I only filled out a little, just enough to get me through the patch I needed to. But I thought the worksheets would be about more than one person. But it isn't, so each 21 pages just relates to that one character ... for someone like me who loses inspiration if I fill in too much, I knew I couldn't do all of that or I wouldn't be able to finish my book.There are some nuggets of information that I haven't heard of before which helped me think about my characters' needs.In one example of a need, I had trouble believing in the character who was in the demo, so the author lost me there. She was a mother of four children, with a house falling around her ears, who never told her children about her money troubles. I found that example to be weak, as I didn't believe it. Any mother with four children has to live through the, "I wants," and, "Can you buy me this?" over and over and over and over. Children don't understand why the hot water system has broken down and you can't fix it, they want to know why. The author then said that this character isn't the type of woman who's going to complain to her children how hard things are which I found to be a negative attitude toward mothers who tell their kids, "You can't have that toy car today because we need the money to buy food." It would be almost impossible not to have this type of conversation with a child who is old enough to demand things. And every child demands things. Having the mother's need as wanting her children to have everything they need for a happy and healthy life is fine, but if the mother has money troubles she is going to have to explain to her children the reason she can't buy them a whole new wardrobe for winter is because they need to watch their budget and not spend too much. Not only that, but the mother would be trying all different ways to scrimp and save, and because children are so observant and copy their parents, they would pick up on this.So I didn't gain anything useful from that character's demo unfortunately. I do understand it was just a demo, but I did need to see how compelling these needs were, and in this example, they weren't compelling or realistic for me.After that there's questions on Why, Who, What, How, When and Where which make you go more in depth about a need, but as I said, I work better when I don't delve too deeply and let it unfold.I do feel that this book would be more effective if you're just starting a book because if you're already part way through writing a story, you may have figured out your character's need which propels the book. Therefore the needs section won't be of much help. If you are starting out though, I think this would be great.There is a lot of reading to be done here, and some of it can be confusing. Also by about 19% on my Kindle I was getting bored--I didn't feel I was getting to the good stuff of the book. Instead of helping me, the book was starting to take me down the rabbit hole of minutiae and it became boring. The writing also becomes awkward and hard to understand.Like this sentence: But if I'd started the scene there, it would have made too much of something that I managed, through a little sleight of hand, to hide.I had to read that one a few times to even try to understand it.And then there's this whole two page demo in italics about horses and that's meant to be critical. It was really confusing and boring instead.There's more exercises where you have to ask your characters questions and I think doing these exercises would take all the fun out of writing for me. You have to ask why and how he acquired a job, what he does for play, what is his work, how and why did he choose this form of play ....I bought this book, thinking it would have some really good exercises, more like the shadow room one, but it doesn't. It's more of a figuring out every aspect of your character type of book, even though the author says you don't have to do that ... well you still have to read through it, and then you think about it, so...I stopped reading this book because it didn't live up to what I wanted. I hoped for more cool exercises that would spark inspiration, rather than digging through every detail of a character's life. If that's your thing, you might like this. I found it unreadable. Sorry.