Included with a Kindle Unlimited membership.

Read with Kindle Unlimited

Buy new:

$19.98

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime & FREE Returns

FREE delivery Sunday, August 14 if you spend $25 on items shipped by Amazon

Or fastest delivery Thursday, August 11. Order within 12 hrs 23 mins

Select delivery location

In Stock.

As an alternative, the Kindle eBook is available now and can be read on any device with the free Kindle app. Want to listen? Try Audible.

[{"displayPrice":"$19.98","priceAmount":19.98,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"19","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"98","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"xpCIyyxQ8KrwhKwdOS7Q5GHKMcBWVQdGEfHlF6pAFjMQJQ0TiC60%2FLoNO49tAYMPk%2BH75HIJoeQF%2BHkopOp04%2BGEQxpMLqCLhJExVmqybOOYyQjj7NscPAUgCb7UrT8dr6UqlroEppde2nXzigBXVA%3D%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW"}]

$$19.98 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Secure transaction

Ships from

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Details

Ships from

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Return policy: Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt

Add a gift receipt for easy returns

Share <Embed>

Have one to sell?

Sell on Amazon

Flip to back Flip to front

Listen Playing... Paused You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more

See all 2 images

Follow the Author

Eileen Cook

Build Better Characters: The psychology of backstory & how to use it in your writing to hook readers Paperback – October 15, 2019

by Eileen Cook (Author), Donna Barker (Editor), Crystal Hunt (Editor)

361 ratings

Part of: Creative Academy Guides for Writers (6 books)

See all formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Kindle

"Please retry"

$7.99

—

Audible Audiobook, Unabridged

"Please retry"

$0.00

Free with your Audible trial

Hardcover

"Please retry"

$24.99

—

Paperback

"Please retry"

$19.98

$15.29

Kindle
$0.00 Read with Kindle Unlimited to also enjoy access to over 1 million more titles $7.99 to buy
Audiobook
$0.00 Free with your Audible trial
Hardcover
$24.99

2 New from $24.99
Paperback
$19.98

7 Used from $15.29 1 New from $19.98

Great on Kindle

Great Experience. Great Value.

Enjoy a great reading experience when you borrow the Kindle edition of this book with your Kindle Unlimited membership. Learn more about Great on Kindle, available in select categories.

View Kindle Edition

Enhance your purchase

Compelling characters are what keeps readers turning pages and buying books — from fantasies to mysteries to the great literary novel. But how to do you create characters that feel three dimensional and real on the page? Counsellor and author Eileen Cook shares common psychological techniques to help you build your characters and take your story to the next level.

Covering understanding your character's backstory and how it impacts their choices in your book by doing a structured counselling interview, personality structure (Myers Briggs and Emotional Intelligence) and how that may lead to conflict, and understand dissecting the Stages of Change to see how your character moves through them .

Filled with practical tips, examples and prompts this is a craft book you will return to over and over.

This is the second book in the Creative Academy Guides for Writers series. Be sure to check out the rest of the guides for writers in this series.

Scrappy Rough Draft by Donna Barker
Build Better Characters by Eileen Cook
Strategic Series Author by Crystal Hunt

Print length

312 pages
Language

English
Publication date

October 15, 2019
Dimensions

6 x 0.78 x 9 inches
ISBN-10

1926691954
ISBN-13

978-1926691954
See all details

Frequently bought together

+
+

Total price:

To see our price, add these items to your cart.

Choose items to buy together.

by Eileen Cook Paperback
$19.98
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
Get it as soon as Sunday, Aug 14
by Eileen Cook Paperback
$19.99
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
Get it as soon as Sunday, Aug 14
by K.M. Weiland Paperback
$11.79
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
Get it as soon as Sunday, Aug 14

Eileen Cook
173
Paperback
6 offers from $19.04
K.M. Weiland
1,961
Paperback
24 offers from $8.21
John S. Warner
79
Paperback
6 offers from $13.71
T.M. Holladay
650
Paperback
9 offers from $11.88
Becca Puglisi
2,877
Paperback
25 offers from $16.99
Darian Smith
488
Paperback
21 offers from $8.43

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This book should be in every writer's toolbox." Elizabeth Boyle NYT Bestselling Author"With warmth and humor, Eileen Cook utilizes her extensive experience as an author and counsellor to help novice and experienced writers build better characters. Eileen's incites, advice, and exercises will give writers a deeper understanding of their characters. . . And maybe even themselves." Robyn Harding Bestselling Author of The Arrangement"In Building Better Characters, writers will learn how to get to the heart of their characters, and more importantly, how to translate this to the page, enriching their writing, deepening their stories. Using her experience as a professional counsellor, Cook shows writers how to delve into the psychology of their characters in order to give them depths that show who they are. Cook takes you on a fun and fascinating journey, complete with laugh-out-loud and a-ha moments. You'll wonder where this book has been all your writing life, and be doubly glad to have found it." Joelle Anthony Author of Speed of Life and Month of Mondays"Build Better Characters" is a fascinating, fresh take on the challenge of creating actual human beings on the page, whose actions and motivations we can relate to or understand - the stuff that drives our curiosity and makes us heavily invest in their story. I found this a very insightful and engaging read." Carol Mason Author of The Shadow Between Us

Start reading Build Better Characters on your Kindle in under a minute.

Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ The Creative Academy (October 15, 2019)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 312 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1926691954
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1926691954
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.01 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.78 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #77,483 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #216 in Writing Skill Reference (Books)
- #401 in Fiction Writing Reference (Books)

Customer Reviews:
361 ratings

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Eileen Cook

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Eileen Cook is a multi-published author with her novels appearing in nine different languages. She spent most of her teen years wishing she were someone else or somewhere else, which is great training for a writer. She's a frequent speaker at conferences and is a writing mentor and coachhelping other authors find their voice.

You can read more about Eileen, her books, and the things that strike her as funny at www.eileencook.com. Eileen lives in Vancouver with two dogs and no longer wishes to be anyone or anywhere else.

Customer reviews

5 star		77%
4 star		15%
3 star		5%
2 star		2%
1 star		1%

How customer reviews and ratings work

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Jenny G

Indepth Character Review

Reviewed in the United States on October 2, 2019

Verified Purchase

Do you want to know your character better than you know yourself? Do you want to make them jump off the page and hook your readers? Then this is the book for you!

Eileen Cook's brilliant book gives you the insight of a therapist trained to understand and coach your characters through their most difficult life circumstances. And she'll help you too.

This will quickly become one of the staple books in your writer's library!

21 people found this helpful

Helpful

Douglas Gurske

I REALLY liked this one!

Reviewed in the United States on September 22, 2021

Verified Purchase

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!

11 people found this helpful

Helpful

B Murphy

Get inside their heads

Reviewed in the United States on February 1, 2020

Verified Purchase

As an author I like to create characters that readers relate to, this book provides solid advice for getting inside your character's heads so that when you put them into situations they behave as real people would. Generating fresh intriguing characters is the lifeblood of fiction. If you are a fiction writer, whether you are writing your first novel or your fifty-first novel, this book will help you bring your characters to life.

13 people found this helpful

Helpful

Michelle Cornish

A great resource for understanding your characters!

Reviewed in the United States on December 12, 2019

Verified Purchase

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!

7 people found this helpful

Helpful

Kevin F.

A view from another angle

Reviewed in the United States on December 2, 2020

Verified Purchase

I used this book for help in screenwriting, not novel writing, and what I found most useful is to see character from the perspective of the psychologist. WHY do we do what we do? There's a mountain of books out there on how to write character. This one gives you the psychological underpinnings, a unique approach and highly useful. It would get all the stars if it was focused on screenplays instead of novels, but now I’m just being greedy.

27 people found this helpful

Helpful

Kayla T.

Very helpful!

Reviewed in the United States on February 11, 2020

Verified Purchase

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.

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

Carolyn LaBille

Fantastic

Reviewed in the United States on April 5, 2021

Verified Purchase

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

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

Unknown

Excellent resource.

Reviewed in the United States on January 28, 2020

Verified Purchase

So many things I hadn’t considered.

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Alice

Some good advice but half of book is same stuff repeated

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 19, 2021

Verified Purchase

Some good advice but substantial part of book is a series of questions based on formulaic psychology questions, which leaves u feeling a little shortchanged

One person found this helpful

LibrosSiempre

An interesting read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 21, 2020

Verified Purchase

I enjoyed this book. People aren't two dimensional creatures, this book is interesting both from a writing and psychology perspective.

One person found this helpful

Susan Pieters

Psychology applied to Storytelling!

Reviewed in Canada on March 6, 2020

Verified Purchase

Eileen has an entertaining way of weaving information and story to really teach some good truths about human nature and what makes us believe in "real" characters. The many questions which end the chapters were good worksheets, I need to really sit down and get to know the deep dark secrets and motivations more clearly of my key players. And maybe even learn something about myself!

2 people found this helpful

Aqua

A great character building resource for Writers!

Reviewed in Canada on October 2, 2019

Verified Purchase

This book is a wonderful resource for building characters, delving into their subconscious, and figuring out why your characters do the things they do. Eileen has written a guide to go beyond the common traits of a character (like appearance, job, and favorite color) using her psychology background to give writers the resources they need to build compelling characters. Writers will find themselves referring to the techniques offered over and over again. I highly recommend this book.

6 people found this helpful

Amazon Customer

Was just okay…

Reviewed in Australia on October 18, 2021

Verified Purchase

There’s nothing new about incorporating psychology concepts into story plots, nor was there anything new about the concepts in this book.

You’ll probably learn more from great authors whose scopes of perceptions are much wider, if you wish to expand your views and to get inspirations for character building.

The author just borrowed psychological concepts and I find the manner by which the author relayed these concepts to be very dull and limited.

I’m a hard critic on this book as it was published under the banner of “Creative Academy For Writers”, yet I don’t find the styles of writing to be creative at all.

Just my 2 cents

See all reviews

Buy new: $19.98

Follow the Author

Build Better Characters: The psychology of backstory & how to use it in your writing to hook readers Paperback – October 15, 2019

Enhance your purchase

Frequently bought together

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Editorial Reviews

Review

Product details

About the author

Eileen Cook

Customer reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Top reviews from other countries

Buy new:

$19.98