The one I can’t live without.

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

Version: Kindle (Because it’s SO easy to flip quickly thru the chapters and back to the Index to find what I need.)

Description:  Basically, it’s a long list of emotions broken up by chapter.  Each chapter then describes the mannerisms, body-language, and internal bodily sensations associated with that particular emotion.  Each emotion has lots of options and ideas

When I use:  Pretty much any time I am writing or editing.  This is by far my most every-day-use craft book.

How I use: Straight forward:  I start with knowing what my character is feeling in a specific moment and use the book to find a non-cliché way to express the emotion.  I generally don’t copy from the book word-for-word, but instead pick up ideas and then customize them into something to fit the character, moment, story.  For example, for the emotion ‘Hurt’ the book says ‘A slow, disbelieving head shake.’  I might write she looked right and then left as if searching for a way avoid the painful truth that was right before her eyes.

Straightening Things Out: I start with knowing what is going on with a scene to my character but can’t seem to pin down how my character is feeling about it.  Maybe the character does something or says something that feels unique but is undefined.  I’ll run through the list of chapter headings looking for a motion that seems to match.  I’ll make a list of several that seem to fit and look up their details.  Brownie points if what I finally come up with is two seemingly different emotions that my character is managing to feel semi-simultaneously.