Sunday, February 21, 2016

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




13 comments:

Peggy Shaw said...

sounds like a good read.

Peggy Shaw said...

Thanks for sharing.

Robyn Campbell said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Robyn Campbell said...

I made a goof in the previous comment.> Hey Sheila, sounds great. I usually use the Emotion Thesaurus. But this sounds great too. Emotion is hard to write for me.

Ginger Weddle said...

This book sounds great! Thanks for your tips!

jo kittinger said...

True emotion is always a challenge!

Evelyn said...

Sounds like a helpful book. Thanks for sharing the review.

Unknown said...

Thanks. I'll check it out.

Unknown said...

This is a wonderful article!

Nancy Kelly Allen said...

Emotions are so difficult to write. Great blog post.

Catch My Words said...

I would love to win this book! Thanks for the contest.

Lynn Slaughter said...

Sounds like something that would be really useful! Thanks for the review.
Lynn Slaughter

Kim Erickson said...

This looks like a wonderful book.