Creating Character Emotions by Ann Hood

February Book Giveaways

Creating Character Emotions by Ann Hood

Copyright: 1998

Publisher: Story Press Books

Price: 14.99

Pages: 170

This book begins with an Introduction and is divided into Parts One and Two, followed by an index.

Part One is titled: Writing About Emotion and is subdivided into fourteen topics.

Part Two: The Emotions is divided into thirty six emotions!

Do you yearn to write emotions without it sounding like a cliché? I do and so I bought this book hoping it would tell me exactly how to write despair, worry, fear. But you know what? That would probably be plagiarism. So how do you write an emotion and still keep it fresh?

This book will get you wrinkling your brain when you want to describe a character's emotion.

Instead of writing the first thing that comes to mind "-try to write the second thing that comes into your mind."

How do you do that?

Examples are given by authors. For worry no actions are used by Ernest Hemingway, just dialogue.

Jealousy is a hard emotion to write and avoid cliché at the same time.

I love the exercise given for this:

"Make a list of ten details that would evoke jealousy for your character and then write ten unusual ones. Now can you write a paragraph using some of your list?"

This would be a good way to write anger or fear too.

Another example given in the book is to write as many cliché's as you can and then try to write them in a new way.

I've seen this done before and some with good success.

Excitement is so over done, but think of a time when you were really excited. Was it when you went to your first concert? First kiss? Ann gives the example of when she took her niece to a Broadway musical. "Yes her eyes were shining and her hand gripped mine. But more than that was the excitement of being there-"

The index is filled with topics and the authors used in examples provided.

This is a great reference book for any writer and you can be eligible to win by either leaving a comment here or using the rafflecoptor.

See you next week!

Sheila