Anything like this is good for the writer, or potential author. I appreciated the helps offered, and find that I refer to the book often.

As an aspiring writer, I have been greatly aided by Characters and Viewpoint. Card divides his book into three sections: Inventing Characters, Constructing Characters, and Performing Characters. In the first section, Card outlines where ideas for characters come from, and how to exploit these ideas to their full potential. He advocates interrogating our characters in order to realize them as full-bodied figures. In Part Two, Constructing Characters, Card explains that the characters we need depend on the type of story we are telling (e.g. an event story vs. a character story). He writes that many people (myself included, before I read this book) are under the misguided impression that every story needs to have full character development. He refutes this assertion, saying instead that the amount of characterization needed depends on the type of story we are telling. For example, a character story needs more fully-developed characters than an event story. He goes on to explain how we elicit emotional responses from the audience for certain characters (e.g. how we control their dislike or contempt or pity for the antagonist). Part Three, Performing Characters, outlines how we present our characters and situations to the audience through our use of voice and viewpoint. He further explains the distinction between representational and presentational stories, and which you should choose for your own story.

Overall, I found this work extremely helpful to me in many areas: finding my characters, fleshing my characters out, and presenting my characters to an audience. A wonderful book for any aspiring author!

This book by OSC is a wonderful collection to any aspiring author's collection, but it does not live up to 'How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy'.

Where it discusses Character seriously, it is too much like a strict guideline, for which there can be no such thing for a writer, unless you are writing operation manuals- and in that case, you do not need this book.

The viewpoint sections are the best, where he give descriptions of secnarios from more than one perspective, 1st, 3rd, or even 2nd, and some times in varying detail to show how much decription is over the top and how much description is too little.

However, as I stated earlier, you cannot read this- or any book of this nature- as a bible to writing. If you want to become a writer, you must find your own voice.

This book revolutionized my writing. That is the single greatest testament I can give to it. Card will break down, piece by piece, how to build good characters in every type of fiction, and how to avoid making cliche or overwrought decisions regarding your characters. Excellent!

I did like it, but I was frustrated that so many of his examples for characters were from television and movies. It's easy to use those as examples - no one had to write the description or emotion - someone acted it! He did it a lot, from talking about tension and sorrow and jeopardy - all had movie examples rather than literary ones.
There has to be a better book out there on this subject.