This book is part of an amazing series that I personally think every fiction writer should own. Not many books will give you that ‘kid in a candy store’ feeling, but this bunch truly does.

 

The thesaurus lists all possible emotions that you can imagine (such as schadenfreude, worthlessness, sappiness, validation - 130 in total), and each one comes with a list of phrases that help you show the emotion of the character rather than tell the reader what it is.

 

It explains the technical part of writing emotionally believable characters:

• how to actually make things resonate, instead of just plugging a useful phrase where needed

• how to use dialogue to convey feelings

• how important subext is to show hidden emotion

• what you need to know as a writer to write emotion well

• what research you need to do as the author

• how to solve problems with nonverbal emotions (clichés, melodrama, misusing backstory)

 

This is a brilliant resource that categorises information that would usually take years of reading to collect and makes it super-easy to access in the right moments. In a world where many novels fail to deliver any kind of emotional impact, it’s particularly important for the author to get it right. I’ll always keep repeating this: readers want to feel something that will stay with them.