The Emotion Thesaurus: A Resource for Every Writer

by Sherrey Meyer

The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Expression
by Angela Ackerman & Becca Puglisi

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.

The Emotion Thesaurus is an important writing resource for anyone preparing written materials for a book, newspaper column, magazine article, blog post, and yes, even a book review, if that written piece includes references to persons and their emotions.

I became familiar with the work of Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi at The Bookshelf Muse by way of an online search for writing tools and resources. The Bookshelf Muse is Angela and Becca’s brainchild and a rich resource for writers of all genre.  It was on their blog that I discovered The Emotion Thesaurus. If you’re not familiar with The Bookshelf Muse or The Emotion Thesaurus, please follow one of the links provided.

Many writers struggle with communicating the emotions of their characters to their readers.  Ackerman and Puglisi set out to make this task easier, and they have succeeded. The idea that someone had compiled the equivalent of a Roget’s Thesaurus for emotions and feelings was intriguing to me.

Recently, while participating in the A to Z Blog Challenge, I chose to focus my 26 blog posts on emotions from A to Z used in developing what characters might be feeling in a written work.  Often I would not be able to easily find a good way to express a certain emotion, and when I looked in The Emotion Thesaurus, I would find something that worked.

Since then, in writing my memoir, I have found that this is a work which is helpful in describing my family members.  Even though not writing fiction, the resource is highly valuable.

As I have suggested above, I highly recommend this writing resource to anyone writing for any medium which involves writing about people and their emotions.