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

This book is an invaluable source for any author. It’s so easy to fall into the common patterns of describing a racing heart, sweaty hands or raised eyebrow, and The Emotion Thesaurus reminds you of the range of nuanced reactions a human can actually feel and display. It’s refreshing to experience the depth of body language and facial expression that goes all-too-easily unexplored when writing. This is a handy one-stop tool kit to elevate your scenes and amplify your characters. They stop repeating the same worn reactions and, as an author, you curb the automatic habit of going for those known idioms. You develop some subtlety and variety. Your writing becomes a little more interesting. With 75 emotions to explore, Angela and Becca have shut the door to clichés, and opened one to possibilities. Each entry is faultless in detail with a definition and list of physical signals, internal sensations, mental responses, cues of acute or long term symptoms, and signs of suppression. I kept the thesaurus open every time I wrote a character interaction, and was delighted at the possibilities that opened up. Though there might be a handful of expressions which aren’t listed in this version, this is a perfect help for any amateur or experience writer who wants to elicit a little more emotion in their work. The ebook is sold at a generously low price, so I'd highly recommend the purchase.

I promised my wonderful and long-suffering wife that I wouldn't buy any more book until I'd read everything on our shelves. Now, here I am buying a new thesaurus after reading only 31 of the original 188 titles awaiting my attention. Why? Well a friend (she's a friend, and she made me break a promise to my wife?) passed on a review of this book. I'm afraid I can't now find the link to that review, but thanks to whoever it was! It was the review that persuaded me to bend my knee and ask my lovely other half to bend the rules. Being the woman she is, she agreed, of course. So, what's this reference work like? Well, surprisingly, it's in the form of a thesaurus: novel, eh? There's a short introductory section that provides a brief overview of emotion and its place in writing. A short article on avoiding common problems in conveying nonverbal emotion follows. And a short explanatory piece then explains how best to use the thesaurus. After these pieces come the listings. Now, I don't know about you, but perhaps because I'm a man and therefore emotionally challenged, I'd have found it difficult to come up with a list of more than ten emotions. So it was something of a surprise to discover 75, yes seventy five, listed here. For each of these, the authors have provided a definition of the emotion, a list of physical signals, the internal sensations experienced, the mental responses felt, cues of acute or long-term encounters with and cues of suppressed experience of the emotion. The final piece on each is a short writer's tip. The book sets out to enable writers to convey emotion in the time-honoured fashion of `showing' rather than the easier and less satisfying `telling'. By equipping the writer with a variety of physical signs (body language), visceral experiences (the true and unavoidable internal responses) and degrees of response, the authors help writers to bring deeper feelings to the readers of their works. It succeeds in its stated purpose, by the way. I shall keep this book beside me as I edit in the future, ensuring I create real emotion on the page rather than allow cliché and familiar expression to convey the feelings of my characters. My thanks to the unknown reviewer and my great thanks to Angela and Becca for a super little reference book that I expect to improve my writing for years to come. I think it's probably redundant for me to say I recommend this book, but, there, I've said it anyway.

Have you ever wondered how to describe embarrassment, fear, revulsion? What's the right expression for shame? Well, this book will come to your rescue with a section for the most common human emotions and their corresponding physical and inner expressions and reactions. This is useful not only when you are not sure of what the right emotion would be for a certain feeling, but also when you need help describing it and want to go beyond the usual 'he frowned'. This guide is a definite 'must' for all novice writers and I predict that you will be referring to it over and over again.

If you are a writer, aspiring or very much established, if you love to write fiction, and want to make your characters as authentic, identifiable, and realistic as they can be, if you also want a great, and deep insight into the psychology of people, of your characters, and create far finer character depth, then do not hesitate and moment longer. Buy this series of books. They are an invaluable collection for every writer, no matter how experienced or new to the craft, and I absolutely love them. Packed full of insight and inspiration but paradoxically accessible/swift enough to access without losing your literary thread. They have also enhanced and inspired my fiction in such a profound way. There are only 10 books that have made it to my writing desk (and have read hundreds), only 10 books that live there – and three of these are in this brilliant and inspired fiction rising series. I cannot recommend them highly enough, and that comes from someone who rarely writes reviews but absolutely adores writing fiction.

This is a well-thought out resource and it is laid out in a useful and easily accessible manner. There is a certain amount of overlap, but then of course different emotions do share some of the same 'symptoms', for example, a character may well have a rapid heartbeat accompanied by perspiring palms in a number of situations. The thesaurus is easy to use: your character is feeling apprehension, excitement, or joy - turn to the index, find the page and there you will find a clear list of ways in which humans externalise what they are feeling inside. I am extremely glad I did not buy the rather cheaper Kindle edition. Although I am a proponent of e-reader devices and a Kindle owner myself, this is a good example of where electronics cannot triumph over paper. You can drop in at any point with the paperback, and flick back and forth with ease while keeping a finger in place to mark a page you wish to return to. Just the job - a handy addition to any fiction-writer's bookshelf.

I've had the book for all of 20 minutes and I already feel the need to tell everyone how wonderful and helpful this book is. Need some help with making dialogue believable? Use this book. Need some help with not stating the obvious emotions? Use this book. Need some help with actually writing coherent and flowing thought processes that balances out the visceral and the visual? Use this book! I brought it on the kindle, and admittedly it is a bit frustrating to not be able to flick through the pages with your hands to skim and find exactly what it is you're looking for. But that's fine, cause I love it that much that I'll buy a paperback copy for at home and then keep my kindle copy for when I'm on the go! Absolutely brilliant! About to go purchase the next two books in the series.

This book tells me how a a character feels and acts under the influence of certain emotions, including body language and facial expression. I've long wished for a book like this. There have been books and classes before telling writers about character emotions, but those haven't been as helpful. Typically, those books and classes get it the wrong way round: they tell how to read body language (if a character's posture looks so-and-so, it means he's feeling such-and-such). As a writer, I found those useless. I know what my characters feel; I want to know how to convey this to my readers. For years, I compiled my own list of emotion details for my own use. The material I've come up with has been helpful but limited. I'm glad someone has finally published a book with all the information, much more comprehensive than what I've come up with, and structured the way writers need it. The writer can look up the emotion, and see how it feels physically (useful when the character is the PoV) and how it looks to someone else (posture, facial expression, movement etc - useful when the PoV observes that character). I recommend this book for professional level writers.

This won't do the writing for you but is an invaluable tool in the multitude of influences in the writing process. It takes the form of a dictionary which lists many emotions and then spends a couple of pages on each, giving examples of physical symptoms, sensations, cues, responses and much more. I don't write as much as I would like to and I think that this will help.

What a find! Every author struggles with finding "the right" words sometimes, and this thesaurus, even in book-form, is a very easy-to-use and helpful support for more original writing or just to add more spice to a story. It gave me tons of ideas of how to approach a sentence differently and find new ways to express characters' feelings than just with the eyes...it totally improved my writing. Even just as a read-through it is useful to give thought-provoking impulses one can work with.

色々な表現が楽しめて、とても面白いです。単なる辞書とは、楽しみ方が違います。

*Note (7/13/12): I located the linked navigation a while back, and it's actually very well done. Excellent. Forgot to update the review. I'm rounding up because my only complaint is that I couldn't find a linked list/index to go from one entry to the next, back, or otherwise. I am going to search around the book to see if it does indeed exist and to see if it merely escaped me on my first pass. I'll knock off half a star for that, but I'm going to round up because this truly is a wonderful writing aid. (I'll amend my review if I locate it or if someone points it out.) A wide variety of emotions are given in this book, each of the entries supplying information on the overall effects each emotional state has on people, from what others might notice or see to what a person might feel inside. Thus, it's a wonderful tool for examples in any point of view and wonderfully supports the modern, accepted style: third person limited. However, this tool could just as easily be used for any style or point of view. In my opinion, this guide could be useful to both new and experienced writers of fiction. For the former, this is an amazing resource for learning how to write convincing characters and see how emotions translate into writing (then, hopefully, provoking sympathy, empathy, or whatever feeling you wish to evoke in the reader). For the latter, I would say that this can easily be a go-to reference for experienced writers to shake things up a bit and to avoid the long hours of research it would require to do the legwork already done in this guide. I've loaded this book onto my Kindle, and it's ready to go, along with my thesaurus, dictionary, and other reference material. This is one book that will be permanently loaded onto my device.

Un must-have pour tous les écrivains! Excellent travail et les autres tomes de cette série sont tout aussi bien. Dommage qu'il n'existe pas de traduction

Another great addition to the series by Ackerman & Puglisi. I think I've got just about all of these in eBook format. I think it's time to get them in paperback as well. They've all been brilliant resources to help my writing.