Create A Clinic Review

Holly Lisle's Create A Character Clinic is a very valuable resource for the fiction writer. Her exercises flesh out the characters and story in amazing ways.

I decided to use it to create the main character for a newly formed novel idea. This idea was very small. I only knew my inspiration -- how the world of online gaming connects people together -- but no idea of how to pull it off.

Through Holly's techniques, I found my character. And a load of surprises. Instead of a male character, as I imagined in my preliminary idea, my character turned out to be a young female in her twenties named Muriel. Also, instead of owning just one or two of the possible life and personality traits from my list of inspirations, she has nearly all of them now.

How could I possibly show a character with so much going on? At first, I balked when she developed so many traits. This was stepping out of my comfort zone with characterization. Holly's exercises and techniques not only show me how a character could work with so much going on, but also how the story itself could evolve out of those traits. I now have pieces of the beginning, middle, and end of my novel, and I know how to connect them.

What's really amazing for me is the fact that this novel is outside my normal genre.

The surprises Holly's clinic brought didn't stop there either. Characters around Muriel leapt out of the exercises and into my story. Her exercises not only fleshed out my main character and the story, but also brought life to the secondary characters.

Holly Lisle's Create A Character Clinic is one resource I'm going to use over and over again.

Click here to try Create A Character Clinic, by Holly Lisle for yourself!