But what are the rest of us to do? When I let characters just do their thing in my stories they tend to do things simply because the plot needs them to do it, and that's no good for fiction. What comes easily for some writers comes only with difficulty and work for me and writers like me. Character Creation for the Plot-First Novelist provides a logical, sensible method for working up believable characters. No mystery; just a reasonable system of layers that results in good characters. On my writer's bookshelf I've got more books on creating characters than on any other topic in fiction. But in all that searching I never found a method that worked for me. Possibly because those books are often written by people for whom the task of character creation comes naturally. So it's back to my earlier question: what about the rest of us? Character Creation for the Plot-First Novelist begins with a core personality type and then adds onto that from seven major angles. The whole system culminates in a monologue you'll write that shows you (sometimes quite surprisingly) that you fully know who this character is and what he or she acts, dresses, looks, and most importantly for fiction talks...