How to Build Fictional Characters

by Dwight V. Swain

Charles-Edouard Jeanneret set about the taks of reinventing everything he had touched, from himself to architecture. Famously, he began with his own name. His resonant pseudonym, Le Corbusier, meant crow-like, and he spent most of his career observing - as if from the air, like a crow - the wide horizon of worldwide developments in architecture, painting, writing, urbanism and politics. From this bird-eye view he picked out the topics that interested him the most, before touching down to develop his work in more detail, through an interplay of the different disciplines.

Audio Cassette

First published April 1, 1992

About the author

Dwight Vreeland Swain's first published story was "Henry Horn's Super Solvent", which appeared in Fantastic Adventures in 1941. He contributed stories in the science fiction, mystery, Western, and action adventure genres to a variety of pulp magazines.

He joined the staff in the extremely successful Professional Writing Program at the University of Oklahoma training writers of commercial fiction and film. He pioneered scripting documentaries and educational/instructional films using dramatic techniques rather than the previously common talking heads. In the 1960s, he scripted a motion picture, Stark Fear, starring Beverly Garland and Keith Toby. He later wrote non-fiction books about writing, including Techniques of the Selling Writer, Film Scriptwriting, Creating Characters, and Scripting for Video and Audiovisual Media, and was much in demand as a speaker at writers' conferences throughout the US and Mexico.