The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Expression, by Becca Puglisi and Angela Ackerman is an essential guide for writers interested in creating powerful and believable emotions in their characters. The first few chapters have helpful advice on how to use emotion in your writing. The bulk of the book is intended to be used as a reference, featuring 130 emotions, with each emotion entry having a definition, physical signals and behaviors, internal sensations, mental responses, acute or long-term responses, signs that the emotion is being suppressed, other emotions may follow from the emotion, and associated power verbs. The end of each emotion entry also has a writer’s tip as a fun nugget of writing wisdom that gave me an incentive to flip through every entry.
The Emotion Thesaurus is so useful that I plan on integrating its use into my writing process. Below, I’ve provided the twelve concepts from the book that I found most useful.
1. Show, Don’t Tell by Avoiding Named Emotions
When revising your work, you should search for places where emotions are specifically named. Often, naming an emotion shows a lack of confidence in your ability to clearly show it through thoughts, sensations, and body language. Instead, utilize strong nonverbal and verbal cues so you negate the need to explain the emotion to the reader. Running a search for the word “felt” can help you identify when you are telling an emotion rather than showing it.
2. Utilize the Four Vehicles of Nonverbal Communication
To successfully convey feelings, writers should utilize nonverbal communication, which includes vocal cues, body language, thoughts, and visceral reactions. While physical reactions show what emotion is present, a character’s thoughts show why it is there. You must include both physical reactions and thoughts to ensure the scene makes sense.
3. Leverage Subtext in Dialogue
Writing completely candid conversations will cause them to fall flat because people generally do not deal with each other that way. Subtext is the underlying meaning in a conversation that contains the hidden elements characters are uncomfortable sharing, such as their true opinions, fears, or vulnerabilities. Characters actively seek to keep these underlying elements hidden, which results in seemingly contradictory words and actions.
4. Establish an Emotional Baseline First
Before writing a character’s reaction to major conflict and upheaval, you need to establish a baseline of how they behave in everyday situations. Imagining your character in benign, everyday scenarios, like dealing with a car that won’t start, being late, or having plans change, helps you get a feel for their typical reactions.
5. Customize Expressions to the Character’s Personality
You should consider a character’s natural level of expressiveness, as some people are reserved while others are demonstrative, shaping how they express themselves. Customize their emotional responses based on their unique personality and comfort zone. Give your character unique body language, like running a finger along the seam of their jeans when they are deep in thought, to help them leap off the page.
6. Connect Extreme Reactions to Backstory and Wounds
Volatile and powerful reactions are a great way to show deeper layers and can hint at an emotional wound, which is a painful past event the character has never moved past. Whatever difficult trauma is in a character’s past will act as a trigger, reawakening their pain and causing them to overreact.
7. Focus on the Cause-and-Effect Relationship
Description is clearest when you adhere to the real order of events in a scene: first show the action (the stimulus), and then the reaction (the response). Showing this cause-and-effect relationship is vital when trying to convey authentic emotion. If a critique partner is confused by a character’s emotional reaction, check to make sure the stimulus trigger is prominent.
8. Avoid Melodrama by Abbreviating
Trying to recreate highly emotional events in real time inevitably results in long paragraphs or pages of melodrama. While real life can sustain this intensity, the written word cannot do so in a way readers will accept. To avoid melodrama, abbreviate extensive emotional scenes so they are long enough to convey the necessary information, but not so long that you lose your audience.
9. Look Beyond Facial Expressions
Do not get overly caught up on using eyes to convey emotion, as they offer very limited possibilities for description. It is easy to rely too much on facial expressions when delivering emotional description. Instead, you should look down and describe what the character’s arms, hands, legs, and feet are doing.
10. Map Emotions on a Continuum
Emotions operate along a continuum ranging from mild to extreme. You must know where your character is on that continuum for each situation and choose your descriptors appropriately. Because emotions usually do not jump from mild to extreme in a short period, you must lay a proper foundation to show how stressors lead to greater intensity.
11. Use the Environment to Enhance Emotion
You can evoke powerful feelings by embedding triggers in the setting to awaken your character’s insecurities or touch on a past wound. Look for symbolism within the location, finding unique objects that perfectly embody the emotion the character feels inside. Lighting and weather details can also be used to affect a character’s mood or provide tension by standing in the way of their goals.
12. Ensure Emotion Drives the Story Forward
Emotion should always lead to decision making. Whether those decisions are good or bad, they must propel the story forward.
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