I’m generally not a fan of writing books. There’s a whole industry devoted to aiding writers and scores of books about every minuscule aspect of writing. Most of them are nothing more than common sense packaged and marketed as a secret or revolutionary new method. Shenanigans.

I, however, have found this book to be very helpful in creating or clarifying character motivation and development. In my NaNoWriMo novel, I was struggling with one of my characters. Linus was flat and stereotypical. I really needed him to be something special to help carry the story forward. This book helped me find his motivation and make him whole.

The author’s also offer other “Thesaurus” books for emotions, negative or positive traits, urban or rural settings. I own most of them on Kindle, but cannot yet speak to their efficacy. What I really needed for the last book was a weather thesaurus to help describe the climate changes since I used weather much like a character rather than a function of setting. Maybe that’s the book I’ll write to enter the “train the writer” marketplace.