Book Review: The Emotion Thesaurus (2nd edition)

One of the biggest struggles for writers is how to convey emotion to readers in a unique and compelling way. When showing our characters’ feelings, we often use the first idea that comes to mind, and they end up smiling, nodding, and frowning too much.

If you need inspiration for creating characters’ emotional responses that are personalized and evocative, this ultimate show-don’t-tell guide for emotion can help. It includes:

• body language cues, thoughts, and visceral responses for 130 emotions that cover a range of intensity from mild to severe, providing innumerable options for individualizing a character’s reactions
• a breakdown of the biggest emotion-related writing problems and how to overcome them
• advice on what should be done before drafting to make sure your characters’ emotions will be realistic and consistent
• instruction for how to show hidden feelings and emotional subtext through dialogue and nonverbal cues

The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer's Guide to Character Expression (2nd edition) by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi was published February 14, 2019, by JADD Publishing.

As a writer, showing character emotion has always been a struggle for me. Growing up as a Gen X kid of the 70's, keeping our emotions in check and controlled is just what we did. Old ingrained patterns are hard to break. Luckily, I discovered this book.

The first twenty-six pages are devoted to emotions in the writing craft (their power, how to portray them in an authentic manner, and the roles of dialogue and subtext). This is a solid primer for authors with examples to illustrate the pointers.

The bulk of the book then is outlining (alphabetically) 130 emotions. Each is given a two-page breakdown that covers physical, internal, and mental aspects. We are also shown escalation and de-escalation steps in the emotional scale (with quick page jumps to those sections in the book). Finally, each entry includes a short Writer's Tip relating to emotions at the end that you'll want to make sure you check out.

I am certain this will be a guide that is going to get a lot of use in my writer's toolkit, especially when I am editing my initial drafts (the place I often find where I need to punch up my emotional aspects of my stories).