Kicking off our new blog and writer's tips... I'm so excited about the new book I just bought, called The Emotion Thesaurus, A Writer's Guide to Character Expression, by Angela Ackerman & Becca Puglisi. I am IN LOVE with this book! These two amazing writers knew exactly what I needed!
The idea of it is to help you expand the words you use in your description, adding depth and making you a better writer. I'm pretty far into my book, and I have found that I end up using similar descriptions of emotions throughout, which I don't want to do!
The authors made this guide really easy to use. Let's say that you are writing a scene where someone is really scared, so the root emotion the character might feel is FEAR. So you just look up the word fear, and there's a whole list of physical signs, mental reactions, cues they could develop if the character feels the emotion for a long time, other emotions it could escalate to, and cues of what the character might do if the feeling is suppressed. It's BRILLIANT!!
I shared most of the introduction of the book at our meeting yesterday, because I really loved everything they said! I won't spoil it for you, and I really believe this book is worth purchasing, so snag yourself a copy!! The authors have a blog, which you should definitely check out. It's called The Bookshelf Muse.
The other tip I shared yesterday is this website I found listing the Top 10 Writer's Blogs of 2011. The info found on these blogs is FANTASTIC! I totally got lost looking through archives and soaking up tons of good information! I shared one post in particular, called How To Ensure that 75% of Agents Will Request Your Material, by Marcus Sakey. I mean, how can you not want to know about that??
Well those are all the little gems I have for you today! Keep checking back to see what the other Riveting Writer's come up with!
Brooke
