The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer's Guide to Character Expression

by Angela Ackerman

[inlibrisveritas]

Yes, you’re seeing this page right. I’m reviewing a thesaurus! But this isn’t just any old run of the mill thesaurus this is all about emotions! I’ve been eyeing this for a while, so when I won it I actually squealed a bit, which I must say is a first for me.

Before you even get to the thesaurus you get a nice two part introduction to using emotion effectively in what ever you are writing along with some helpful tidbits on getting it to work better. Then of course we get to the meat of the book. I love the way the pages are setup. We are given the definition, physical signals, internal feelings, mental responses, cues of acute or longer term versions of the feeling, what emotions it can lead to and what it looks like when it’s suppressed. There are even great writer tips on each emotion’s page. There are 75 emotion entries and it covers everything!

I’ve been working on my latest NaNoWriMo project so this book is getting a wrok out right now. I’ve found it incredibly helpful for scenes where I want to describe how someone feels but since I know someone doesn’t want to read ‘her eyes were filled with sadness’ it’s great to be able to flip this open and grab some ideas on how to get my character to portray the emotion without just out and out saying it. I love te little writer tips at the end of each entry as well, because they help with all kind of writing issues like the need for varying sentacne structure and the overuse of visual/audio cues.

If you are a writer then I definitely recommend this. It’s been such a help and I honestly think it’s brillant that these ladies came up with something so genius! They also have a Positive Trait Thesaurus and Negative Trait Thesaurus that I really want, so be sure to check those out as well!