Book Review of The Emotion Thesaurus

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

Authors:  Angela Ackerman & Becca Puglisi

Published:  May 2012

Available as eBook, PDF and paperback

Available thru Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iTunes, Kobo, and Smashwords.

Book Description 

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. Written in an 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 writers to show, not tell emotion and is a creative brainstorming resource for any fiction project.

Review

Being a follower of The Bookshelf Muse blog, I was really excited to learn that Angela and Becca were putting together a book about characters emotions.  I knew this was going to be a book that not just myself, but all writers would greatly benefit from.

This easy to use guide covers 75 different emotions.  I like how each emotion is broken down in the book.  There is a definition for each of the emotions, physical signals, internal sensations, mental responses, cues of acute or long term (insert emotion being covered), what each of the emotions may escalate to, cues of suppressed (insert emotion being covered), and finally writer's tips.  

For anyone who struggles with how to show, not tell characters emotions, this helpful guide will make the task much easier to accomplish.  It also helps in avoiding the use of tired, overused cliches that make there way into writing, more times than we'd like.

I have a PDF copy of The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer's Guide To Character Expression, but plan on getting a paperback copy of the book so that I have the guide more readily accessible when I'm away from the computer.  This book will never collect dust on my bookshelf, as it will be referred to again and again.  I think this book should be in every writer's toolkit.  The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer's Guide To Character Expression is definitely worth the money you will spend on it.