A frequent problem area for fiction writers is characterization. If writers jump headlong into a story with only a fuzzy notion about the people who are in it, the result is a collection of characters who are cliched, stereotypical and not very interesting. Creating Characters is an easy to use reference work that looks at character development from many different angles. The book does not tell writers how to write. Instead, it generates a thought process by asking crucial questions about characters' internal and external traits, wants, needs, likes, dislikes, fears, beliefs, strengths, weaknesses, habits and backgrounds. Following these questions, the writer will find an ever deeper and wider array of options. Thus, Creating Characters helps writers delve as deeply into a character's psychology as they want. All characters, and the stories they people, can be made richer and more compelling.

This is a provocative contribution to contemporary ethical theory challenging foundational conceptions of character.

Analyzing the American presidents from George Washington to George W. Bush

Bockting has produced a work that focuses on the "people" that Faulkner created in his four major psychological novels: The Sound and the Fury (1929); As I Lay Dying (1920), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). The author writes not about these people, either as literary characters or as human beings, but instead has allowed them to come alive in their own time, through their own texts. Psychostylistics is the innovative approach to the literary character that Bockting employs, bringing together new developments in narrative psychology and psychiatry with literary stylistics and mind-style to provide detailed textual and contextual evidence in support of its observations on personality. Contents: The Literary Character: Between Life and Linguistic Style; Mind-Style in The Sound and the Fury; Multiple Voices in As I Lay Dying; Light in August and the Issues of Unreliability; Absalom, Absalom!: A Novel of Attribution; Character, Personality, and Psychostylistics.