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| Photo credit: Goodreads |
Before I rave about its awesomeness, here’s the Goodreads summary:
“One of the biggest problem areas for writers is conveying a character's emotions to the reader in a unique, compelling way. This book comes to the rescue by highlighting 75 emotions and listing the possible body language cues, thoughts, and visceral responses for each.
Using its easy-to-navigate list format, readers can draw inspiration from character cues that range in intensity to match any emotional moment. The Emotion Thesaurus also tackles common emotion-related writing problems and provides methods to overcome them.
This writing tool encourages authors to show, not tell emotion and is a creative brainstorming resource for any fiction project.”I tweeted a while back that The Emotion Thesaurus is perpetually open in my Nook app while revising, and I wasn’t exaggerating. Whenever I reach a moment where I’m struggling to describe an emotion, or I get a CP note asking for more emotion from a character, I open up The Emotion Thesaurus.
It’s not a book that you necessarily read from cover to cover (although you’re more than welcome to), it’s a resource that you open when trying to describe a particular (or several) emotions. What I love about it is it not only lists body language cues, thoughts and physical responses, but it also lists cues of suppressed emotion (which I use all the time). As a bonus, it has writing tips at the end of every chapter.
To top it off, none other than Kristen Lamb recently recommended The Emotion Thesaurus in The Huffington Post (under #4) as have dozens of other writers across the web. And out of nearly 500 reviews on Goodreads, it has a 4.57 star average—and with good reason.
I honestly can’t recommend this book enough to writers of all stages. It will forever change the way you think about and write emotion—or at least, it did for me.
What resources do you use to help write emotion?
Twitter-sized bites:
Is THE EMOTION THESAURUS by @AngelaAckerman & @beccapuglisi on your bookshelf? Here's why it should be. (Click to tweet)
Do you struggle with writing emotion? Then this wonderful writing tool may be exactly what you need. (Click to tweet)
15 comments:
YES. This book is fantastic! I can't help but recommend it to everybody!
Agreed! I rave about it endlessly. It's such an incredible resource.
Oh my gosh, what a sweet post this is! This means so much, Ava--you know how I love your blog and your writing advice, so I'm honored the book helps this much! Thanks so much for the shout out--you totally started my week off full of happies! :)
You're so welcome, Angela! And thank you for co-authoring such a wonderful resource. Can't wait for the next installment in the Thesaurus series. :)
<3 <3
I'm not saying I believe this necessarily, but wouldn't a book like this 'encourage' people to think inside the box (the box the book provides, at least)?
Either way, based on your highlight of the work, I want to read it, so thanks for the post and please keep up the good work.
Not at all! People act and feel and respond physically a certain way when they feel particular emotions—what The Emotion Thesaurus does is list those automatic responses so that you can then pick and choose what responses your characters may have when feeling that particular emotion. The list for every emotion is pretty enormous, which really allows you to tailor it to your characters. I found that it encouraged me to think more about how the emotions affect my characters when writing, rather than relying on telling about emotions (i.e.: he looked disappointed).
So that's my two cents. :) I recommend downloading a sample or using the "Look Inside" feature on Amazon if you're considering it, but aren't sure.
A writer I knew swore by de Becker's Gift of Fear and Ekman & Friesen's Unmasking the Face. Both have strong notes about universal emotions, how we try to quiet them, and how they make themselves heard with little regard for our intent.
I couldn't live without my emotion thesaurus. I always have it open when I write. Such a great tool that gives me new ideas all the time :)
Interesting! I've never heard of either. I'll have to look them up.
Yes, yes and yes! It's a wonderful resource and I am so grateful to Angela and Becca for writing it. :)
Brilliant, thanks very much, It's already on my wishlist so I'll check it out.
Cheers!
Sure thing! :)
I just ordered this book and took a few minutes to flip through it. Wow! This is just what the doctor ordered =) Thanks for posting about it.
Oh yay! So glad to hear it, Linda—I hope it serves you as well as it did me! :)
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