Hello Everyone! It’s Friday tool time again and this week I’m going to share with you the tool that I use to show my characters emotions. I discovered this book in a Barns & Noble store, back when you could go into the store, pick up the book, and take it to your table and look through it. This was before this pandemic hit, but thankfully you can find it on Amazon. The book is titled The Emotion Thesaurus and it’s worth every penny and then some. I purchased the paperback, because I like to flip around, but for the Kindle price of $5.99 it’s a must have. Actually I would pay the paperback book price three times over.
So lets take a look and see what we get out of it.
This is the front cover, so that you make sure to get the right book.
Inside there you will find a table of contents of all of the emotions that are covered so that you can quickly jump to the one you want to describe. Once you get to the emotion you want, on the left hand side, you will see the definition of the emotion and a list of physical signals so that you can show this emotion and not tell.
On the right side of the emotion you will see several sections such as Internal Sensations, Mental Responses, and Cues of the suppressed emotion.
I’m not a great photographer, so if you are interested in the book, I recommend heading over to Amazon and take a look inside. For quick reference you can click here to go right to the book on Amazon. I highly recommend this book for your writing arsenal. One huge lesson I learned from my writing group is the rule of show, not tell. With emotions, it’s challenging to accomplish this, but book will help you through it.
Until next time, Write Well and Prosper!