Saturday, January 25, 2014

A Book Review of The Emotion Thesaurus

Find it on Amazon here! :)
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. Using its 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.

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (May 6, 2012)
Page Count: 172

What I liked: When my mentor read over my manuscript last year she said I had a lot of generic actions (frowned, sighed, smiled, ect.). The first thing I thought was "How in the heck do I fix that? No one told me about this problem!"

So last year I struggled with trying to eliminate as many of those as I could during a rewrite, but for Christmas I got this Emotion Thesaurus and using it while editing my book has made keeping the emotional tags varied much easier!

The book has just about everyone emotion you could think of and many ways to portray them either physically or internally or mentally and more. Some of the physical ways I never thought of but when I pondered on it I thought to myself "Yeah ... wow people do actual do that. Heck, I do that!"

It has come in so much handy and is much better than wracking my brain to come up with something and I end up spending forty-five minutes on one paragraph (Yes, that happened to me. Don't judge!). Throughout the book it also has helpful tips on how to get the most out of your emotion. This is a great tool and not too expensive either! It definitely has permanent residence on my desk. :)

What I didn't like: I can't really think of anything I didn't like ...

Content Cautions: It's a thesaurus ... Nothing to set off alarms here unless you consider some mention in a PG way of some ways some emotions are expressed bad.

Over all I totally recommend this for any writer! :D Five stars!



About the Authors:
Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi are the creators of the award winning online resource for writers, The Bookshelf Muse (now Writers Helping Writers). Members of SCBWI, both authors write in the Middle Grade and Young Adult genres.












If you enjoyed this review, you can find more over on the Book Reviews tab of click the link. :)

If you liked this post, come back every Saturday for more writing advice, character interviews, book reviews and more! On Sundays I have Soundtrack Sundays where I post a new score piece, Tuesdays are Tea Tuesdays with tea reviews, Wednesdays I have Wonderful Word Wednesdays where I post a new vocabulary word, and Fridays are Fan Fridays where I post tags and other goodies. To help support my dream to be an author follow this blog, like me on Facebook, watch me on deviantART, and follow me on Pinterest and Twitter. If you want to know more about my books check out them out here. Thank you! :)


2 comments: