When it comes to technical writing books I tend to not be one for reading many of the non-fiction help books out there. Not that there is anything inherently wrong with those types of materials. There is plenty that can be gleaned from variances of “how to X” sorts of books. I tend to gravitate more so to items that are almost optimized in a search engine sort of mindset. Largely because for it to be helpful, for me, I want to be able to quickly find what I need because otherwise I’m apt to fall down a million little rabbit holes before finally getting back to my initial question. Thanks Dyslexia.
That preamble all to say, I love the Emotion Thesaurus because it is basically an alphabetized list that lets me zoom over to the needed emotion and break through previous descriptive barriers. Under each emotion category you will find a list of physical responses and behaviors, mental, internal sensations, and even possible things these emotions could escalate to. For such compact sections that is a lot inside and they are immensely helpful in keeping you from accidentally using the same descriptors over and over again as you write your stories.
Another fun insight to the book came from a friend of mine who is a psychologist. When shown the book she exclaimed that this could even be a highly useful tool in counseling to help people better process through their own emotions, as well as help them recognize what particular feelings are being expressed by others around them.
No it isn’t a miracle book, but the ease of use and way it can practically help keep you in a state of “showing” in your writing versus over using “telling” makes it – in my opinion – a very crucial buy. Being that a big part of my desire as a writer is to help support creatives wherever I can, it will continuously be my goal to share with you any practical use tools I find are tried and tested by myself to be very helpful.
If you get it for yourself and use it, I’d love to hear your thoughts on it – even if you aren’t as much of a fan of it as I am.