Introducing Thesaurus Thursdays!

Does this sound familiar?

The coffee on the desk is cold. The doorbell’s ringing. Your dog is making those frantic whimpers meaning ‘I want to go outside and maybe pee on something’ has escalated to ‘Another 10 seconds and you'll need a boat to get to the kitchen’. You are aware of these things, yet stay glued to your chair, your fingers flying across the keyboard. Not now, you think. Not yet!

Because you’re AT THE GOOD PART.

You know what I mean--the part of the story that can’t pour out fast enough. Your MC’s paralyzed by fear, the enemy is sure of victory. All is lost, and won, so THEY think. But not you. No, you know what’s coming next and can’t WAIT to knock the villain off his game and let your MC prove what he’s made of. But first, you need to imprint this moment of fear in your book. You need to make hopelessness seep off the page.

You start to type how your MC is cringing in terror and then stop. You glance back a page and shake your head. Somebody cringed in the last scene--can’t use that one. Hot, shuddering breaths? Nope, breathing’s already come up a million times in this book, so that beat won’t work. You need something different, something unique to show fear. His eyes widened? His face was a frozen mask? Pu-leeze. The POV police are screaming at the thought.

The joy and energy starts to leak out of you. The excitement that brought you here is fading. You can’t seem to find the right way to show the rawness of your character’s fear. Everything action you come up with seems trite or hollow or cliché.

Reality trickles in: the coffee’s even colder now, and the mailman has gone. Your flyers are probably out there on the step, about to blow away. And of course the eerie silence means your dog no longer needs to go outside. You sag in your chair, defeated by a descriptive beat.

As you leave to mop up Mr. Ruffy’s mess, you glance at the computer screen and think, if only I had a thesaurus of emotional beats.

And now you do.

The Bookshelf Muse has a something new for your writer’s toolbox: an Emotion Thesaurus. Now, if you draw a blank on how to show your character’s emotion through a physical action (a beat), we can help. Each Thursday we will introduce new cardinal emotions to our thesaurus, offering you an ‘idea bank’ for the times when you get stuck. You can scroll through our lists, and see if one of our ideas sparks one of your own.

(Many thanks to fellow story weavers Roy Buchanan, Laura Lamond, Madeline Robinette, Joan Szechtman and Helen Evans for their contributions)