Plot Versus Character: A Balanced Approach to Writing Great Fiction

I come from a family of people who consider themselves latent writers. Most of us are secretly working on our great novel that will someday reveal that we, of all the family members, are the real writer. The one with the goods.

Families are weird.

Even weirder is the fact that, other than through school assignments, none of us has ever studied the craft of writing. I'm not sure what we've been thinking - maybe that we were just born knowing how to write amazing fiction?

This was my initial realization when I opened Jeff Gerke's phenomenal book titled Plot Versus Character: A Balanced Approach to Writing Great Fiction. If you are only going to read one book about how to write a novel, this is the book to read!

'Read' is perhaps the wrong verb to use in approaching Gerke's book. It is more like having a mentor work with you to develop your ideas into an early draft, but the exercises he takes you through result in something so much richer than I ever would have achieved on my own.

Gerke explains character and plot and how they work together and then asks you to think about your character in ways that create a believable human being, starting from their Myers-Briggs type.

Once your protagonist is fleshed out, you move on to plot, viewing it as a means to challenge and develop their personality and reveal their transformation through the event of the plot.

If you're like me and have been thinking you were just going to sit down and write your great novel one day, without really studying the how of writing, this is an easy and rewarding book to work through and, if you stick with it, the results will be worth it.

What about you? What books have improved your writing?