Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #384712 in Books
• Published on: 2005-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 239 pages

Customer Reviews

A Treasure Trove for Writers, Directors, Actors and Designers!
In "Inner Drives," Pamela Jaye Smith mines ancient wisdom and compellingly offers up a system of concepts about human motivation that is as valid today as it was thousands of years ago. These astute insights into human character are wonderfully useful tools for today's storytellers, a category which includes not only writers, but also directors, actors, and designers. These concepts can be (and have already been) put to work in any type of narrative, be it a screenplay, a novel, a theatre piece, an opera, or a short story. I believe this system would also be a useful asset in documentary projects, and it will undoubtedly work in my own field of Digital Storytelling... the use of interactive digital media to tell new kinds of dramatic narratives. In fact, Ms. Smith offers up a number of examples from video games.

The system Ms. Smith describes is based on the Eight Classic Centers of Motivation. In Sanskrit, these centers are called the chakras, but other cultures have other names for them. I was amazed to learn how many peoples throughout the world and in different time periods came up with the same general system to understand human nature. She makes a thoroughly convincing case for the universality of this system, and its fundamental accuracy, based as it is on human physiology.

For those of us who are writers, this classic system can be used to answer the a question we are always asking ourselves: "What makes this particular character tick?" This system gives us the God-like power of creating lifelike characters who seem to feel, think and breathe. And we can also use it to populate entire casts of characters -- ones destined to hate each other, to become allies, or to fall in love.

The book abounds with concrete illustrations of characters drawn from various narrative works, familiar characters like Scarlett O'Hara, Rocky and Stanley Kowalski, as well as real people like Charles Manson and Napolean Bonaparte. The examples help make what might at first seem to be an abstract approach to character develpment extremely understandable and usable.

I believe "Inner Drives" is an exciting new way to approach characters and is a wonderful addition to every working writer's library, although as Ms. Smith makes clear, it is not a new system at all, but one that is extremely old.

Reads too much like a history book
I don't understand why the consensus rating is 5/5. I found this book extremely wordy and it reads like a history book. If you want dozens of pages on the historical aspects of (insert your favorite chakra here), then this book is for you. If you want to see the same movies quoted and re-quoted over and over as examples of (insert your favorite chakra here), then this book is for you. If your idea of fun is combing through over one hundred pages dripping with hippy-isms looking for the "meat" you can use, then this book is for you. However, if you want a book that gives you a fair amount of background on a subject, fresh movie examples, and then leaves you with concrete ideas and examples of how to leverage the content matter to improve your characters and stories, then this book is not for you.

Notice how many times I repeat "this book is for you" and you'll get the idea of how this books reads. I am disappointed, especially given the 5/5 rating. It's more a 2/5 in my opinion, I got almost nothing useful out of it.

A Real Writers Journey
Wow. This is a great screenwriting book -- but it's so much more. Not only does it give you a better understanding of character, but it gives you a better understanding of human nature!

Pamela Jaye Smith has written one of the most intelligent, thought-provoking, and in-depth explanations and explorations on the key motivational centers of human beings. You won't ust learn how to build better characters, you'll discover how to develop your own character. No kidding. This is not just a manual for better writing -- it's a manual for better living!

Buy it. Devour it. Apply it. And read it again...and again...