In the early twentieth century, Russian director Constantin Stanislavsky transformed the acting world with a series of techniques he called ?method acting.? By discovering the inner life of a character, actors learned to bring emotional realism to their roles as never before. In Getting Into Character, Collins takes seven of the most eye-opening techniques of the Stanislavsky method and adapts them to the art of writing fiction. Like actors, writers learn how to personalise characters, determine their action objectives in a scene, write subtexted dialogue and much more. Collins concludes each chapter with excerpts from both a familiar classic and a modern bestseller to illustrate how top-notch authors?from Jane Austen to Steve Martini?have used these same techniques to great effect.