# Writers Helping Writers Series https://writershelpingwriters.net/ Author : Becca Puglish, Angela Ackerman 트라우마사전 디테일 사전 : 도시편 디테일 사전 : 시골편 캐릭터 직업 사전 딜레마 사전 트러블 사전 서스펜션 사전 The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Expressions The Negative Trait Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Flaws The Positive Trait Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Attributes The Rural Setting Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Personal and Natural Places The Urban Setting Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to City Spaces The Emotional Wound Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Psychological Trauma The Occupation Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Jobs, Vocations, and Careers The Conflict Thesaurus, Volume 1: A Writer’s Guide to Obstacles, Adversaries, and Inner Struggles The Conflict Thesaurus, Volume 2: A Writer’s Guide to Obstacles, Adversaries, and Inner Struggles The Emotion Amplifier Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Stress and Volatility The Fear Thesaurus: A Writer's Guide to What Holds Characters Back ---- ## The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Expressions (Expanded Second Edition) ISBN 978-0-9992963-4-9 Do your characters smile too much? Are their hearts always racing, their breath rushing, or worse, they stand there, doing nothing at all? It’s okay, you aren’t alone. Writing powerful, fresh emotional descriptions can be a challenge…or rather it used to be before _The Emotion Thesaurus_ came along. Part how-to, part brainstorming tool, this writing guide will help you find the right words to show (not tell) what your character feels. - **Master the Art of Emotion** – Avoid overused expressions like nodding, sighing, and frowning with descriptive brainstorming lists that help you envision how your character might think, act, and behave in the moment.  - **Create a Compelling, Relatable Story Cast** -- Bring Readers in close by having characters process feelings the same way people do using 130 detailed emotion profiles with cues for body language, thoughts, vocal cues, and visceral reactions. - **Easily Spot & Fix Emotion Issues** – Identify common emotion-writing pitfalls and get practical advice for solving them. This guide tackles confusing emotional shifts, inconsistent expressions, and more, so you can polish your story and keep readers invested. - **Reveal Hidden Feelings with Subtext** – Use dialogue and nonverbal cues to show your characters' unspoken emotions and add depth to conversations. Readers will love piecing together what’s left unsaid, heightening their emotional connection to your story. - **Bust Through Writer's Block** – With its simple list format, this book is built to trigger ideas and keep you in the writing flow. Whether you’re drafting or revising, it’s an easy reference to make emotions leap off the page. - **Wield Show-Don't-Tell Like a Pro** -- Create immersive stories by focusing on engaging descriptions. When readers become emotionally invested in your characters, it not only hooks them to the final page...it primes them to come back for your next book! ---- ## The Negative Trait Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Flaws ISBN 978-0-9897725-0-1 Ready to explore the dark side for your protagonist, antagonist, or someone in between? Flaws can hold your character back, cause friction in their relationships, keep them from achievement, and stunt their personal growth. They're a key part of your character's personality and will shape their choices, motivations, and behavior, as well as determining whether they succeed or fail in the story. **This thesaurus helps you:**   - **Develop Realistic, Relatable Characters**. No one is perfect, especially a protagonist. The 100+ flaws in this thesaurus will help you find negative traits for your character that provide depth and believability even as they cause friction with other characters. - **Write Character Actions, Choices, and Decisions with Authority.** Each entry lists the behaviors, attitudes, thoughts, and skewed beliefs tied to a particular flaw, providing you with endless brainstorming material for what your character could do and say when their fears are activated. - **Use Flaws to Shape Character Arcs**. Negative traits are a form of emotional shielding that hold your character back, even while seemingly providing protection. Learn how, if your character is to emerge victorious, they must look inward to see their flaws as destructive forces that need to be addressed. - **Make the Character's Weaknesses Push the Plot Forward**. Reacting poorly in the moment usually doesn't end well, but failures and mistakes can generate moments of internal reflection about what to do next time for a better outcome. ---- ## The Positive Trait Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Attributes ISBN 978-0-9897725-1-8 Every character should have good qualities—even the bad guy. Positive traits can make someone admirable, reveal their identity, define how they approach goal achievement, and dictate the moral compass they live by. Part how-to, part brainstorming tool, this writing guide shines a light on 100 positive traits and the ways they will shape a character's actions, decisions, and behavior. Brainstorm the unique strengths that fortify your character against the obstacles they'll face, and win the reader's heart at the same time. **This thesaurus will help you:** - **Develop Unique, Memorable Characters.** If you're worried about your story's cast blending together or feeling too similar, _The Positive Trait Thesaurus_ has you covered. With profiles for 100 attributes to choose from, you'll be able to make every character one-of-a-kind. - **Write Characters Whose Actions and Decisions Make Sense.** Characters with specific traits will think and behave in a certain way. Our handy lists of descriptions make it easy for you to write consistent characters whose actions and decisions line up with their personality.  - **Avoid the ‘Perfect Character’ Trap.** Balancing strengths with flaws is a breeze with this guide’s advice on pairing the two, which will empower you to create characters who are relatable but have room to learn and grow. - **Bring Friction on Board.** Happy characters in a happy land make for boring stories. Each entry lists conflicting negative traits that will encourage friction with both friends or foes, allowing you to build a dynamic and captivating cast. ---- ## The Rural Setting Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Personal and Natural Places ISBN 978-0-9897725-5-6 Did you know one of the most versatile storytelling elements is vastly underutilized by writers? Harness the power of the setting with _The Rural Setting Thesaurus._ Part how-to, part brainstorming tool, this resource shares expert instruction on how to do more with the setting. Describing the details of your world becomes much easier with this book's handy lists of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures of 100+ natural and personal locations.  **This book will help you:** - **Immerse Readers in the Story.** From the earthy smells of a forest to the soft crunch of snow underfoot, this thesaurus explores rich, sensory details that can transport readers into the heart of each scene. - **Add Depth and Mood.** Your setting is more than a physical place. Learn how to use elements like the weather to mirror your characters’ emotions and struggles, sow tension, and reinforce themes. - **Generate Realistic Conflict in Natural and Personal Locations**. Problems and threats can come from anywhere—through a breach of privacy, unpredictable weather, or rough terrain. This book's recommendations of location-specific complications can help you generate tension and push characters to their limits. - **Use the Setting to Shape the Plot.** Settings can serve as physical obstacles, sources of solace, or hiding places for dangerous adversaries. Discover how to use the setting to support the plot rather than pull attention from it.  - **Utilize Figurative Language for Powerful, Layered Descriptions.** Repurpose descriptive details as metaphors that add layers of meaning and stir the reader's emotions. ---- ## The Urban Setting Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to City Spaces ISBN 978-0-9897725-6-3 Is your setting pulling its weight in the story, or is it just sort of…there? For readers to be fully engaged, they must be immersed in the character's world in every scene. That's where this guide comes in. With instructive content and lists of sensory descriptions for over 120 modern locations, it's like a masterclass on maximizing the setting. **This book will help you:**  - **Transport Readers into the Story.** Every entry explores the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures that correspond with a popular urban location, making it easier than ever to write authentic descriptions. - **Add Realistic Conflict Associated with Urban Environments**. Cities are full of challenges and threats, such as crime, crowds, and socioeconomic dynamics. Whatever metropolitan setting your story needs (an alleyway, bookstore, or prison cell, maybe?), this book provides the complications and plot derailments that could naturally occur there. - **Use the Setting to Characterize and Trigger Emotions.** In addition to showing you how to incorporate sensory details, you'll learn to make strategic setting choices that can be used to stir character emotion and trigger reader empathy.  - **Avoid Backstory Dumping.** The setting has many superpowers, one of which is its ability to reveal a character's history without a big backstory dump. You'll find plenty of instructions on how to drop hints and create windows to the past without stalling the pace or boring readers. ---- ## The Emotional Wound Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Psychological Trauma ISBN 978-0-9897725-9-4 Authentic characters need a compelling past. And like you or me, part of their history should include painful experiences known as emotional wounds that generate fears, insecurities, and trust issues, making it hard for them to take necessary risks. Part how-to, part brainstorming tool, this guide provides expert instruction on the role emotional trauma plays in a character's life (and story). Take a deep dive into 118 real-world painful events that could be part of your character's past. Then show how that pain steers their thought process, actions, and the desire to protect themselves from future hurt. **This book will help you:** - **Create Authentic Characters with Depth**. Painful experiences are part of life and generate lasting psychological effects. This thesaurus gives you the tools to discover and write the root cause of your character's vulnerability, and in doing so, build empathy with the reader. - **Build Meaningful Character Arcs.** Emotional wounds leave marks, and each one has the potential to either cripple or motivate a character. Use this guide to develop and write powerful arcs wherein characters face their past, strive for inner growth, and plot their journey toward healing. - **Uncover Behavioral Nuances**. Each entry delves into a specific trauma and the common fears, insecurities, and dysfunctional behaviors it spawns, allowing you to create characters whose actions, flaws, and reactions feel true to life. - **Reveal Backstory Without Info Dumps**. Learn to seed hints about backstory trauma through dialogue, action, and reaction in a way that enhances (rather than disrupts) the narrative. - **Explore 118 Trauma Scenarios**. With an extensive database of human experiences to loss to choose from, you’ll find the perfect backstory wound for any character and be able to write the fears, struggles, dysfunctional behavior, and misbeliefs associated with each. - **Write Fearlessly.** Writing about trauma requires courage and a skilled hand. This guide is your roadmap for crafting rich emotional moments and character journeys that ring true and will be remembered by readers beyond the final page. ---- ## The Occupation Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Jobs, Vocations, and Careers ISBN 978-0-9992963-7-0 A character’s career is powerful, allowing you to convey a lot of characterization about them in a single punch: traits, skills, priorities, and more. Yet, many writers don't think much about their character's occupation—or worse, they pick something randomly, and miss out on what that job can reveal. Researching specific careers takes time, so we've done the work for you. Part how-to, part brainstorming tool, this guide showcases a range of jobs and breaks each down so you can find the perfect match for your character and write about it with authority.  **This book will help you:**  - **Choose a Tailor-Made Job for Each Character.** From everyday professions to unusual careers, this book covers an array of vocations and provides you with characterizing details that give your cast realistic layers. - **Speed Up the "Get to Know You" Phase**. Because each job needs a certain temperament, personality traits, and skills for it to be done well, it comes with some built-in characterization. Knowing the character's vocation can shorten the learning curve for readers. - **Incorporate Emotional Depth Through Career Choices.** Bring the real world into your fictional one by exploring the _why_ behind a job choice. Whether it stems from an emotional wound, was birthed from an insecurity, or hints at a deep-seated need, that _why_ creates instant depth for the character and more complexity for the story. - **Add Realistic Conflict and Tension**. Work can tempt the character to cross moral lines, damage their relationships, and transform coworkers into dangerous enemies. Each occupation profile lists likely conflict scenarios so you can use the work environment to layer on challenges. - **Help Readers See Themselves in the Story**. Work is often a struggle, demanding time, energy, and sacrifice. Seeing your character in this universal wrestling match will help readers feel connected to them. ---- ## The Conflict Thesaurus, Volume 1: A Writer’s Guide to Obstacles, Adversaries, and Inner Struggles ISBN 978-0-9992963-9-4 Plot compelling fiction with _The Conflict Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Obstacles, Adversaries, and Inner Struggles (Volume 1)_. Part how-to, part brainstorming tool, it provides a myriad of conflict options in the form of relationship friction, failures and mistakes, moral dilemmas and temptations, pressure and ticking clocks, and no-win scenarios. Each conflict offers a range of possible consequences (from minor inconveniences to disastrous results) and gets you thinking about the character's emotional state, personal struggles, and how a meaningful challenge can impact them for the better. **This book will help you:**  - **Create Compelling, Multi-Dimensional Conflict**. With over 100 unique scenarios, this thesaurus offers a rich array of conflicts from moral dilemmas to adversarial showdowns, making it easy to find the perfect problem or obstacle to move story events along. - **Keep Readers Emotionally Engaged**. The right conflicts build tension, raise stakes, and keep readers on the edge of their seats. Each scenario is designed to deepen reader investment as characters are forced to make tough choices and confront personal demons. - **Shape Characters Through Adversity**. Conflict is a gateway to growth. Each entry gives you ideas on how adversity can hamper a character's efforts, result in failure, and present them with difficult moral choices.  - **Layer Consequences to Up the Ante**. Infuse your plot with ticking clocks, relationship tensions, and no-win situations that make every setback feel consequential and deeply personal.  - **Master Internal Conflict**. Understand what internal conflict is and why it’s essential for character depth. Then use that knowledge to create meaningful character arcs that encourage reader investment. - **Learn About Different Adversary Options**. From frenemies to haters to villains, this thesaurus explores the range of adversaries your character might face. ---- ## The Conflict Thesaurus, Volume 2: A Writer’s Guide to Obstacles, Adversaries, and Inner Struggles ISBN 978-1-7361523-1-7 _The Conflict Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Obstacles, Adversaries, and Inner Struggles (Volume 2)_ serves up 115 scenarios that lead to power struggles, lost advantages, dangers, threats, ego-related conflicts, and more. Part how-to, part brainstorming tool, this guide provides you with fresh challenges and story problems that will trip up your characters and make them strive harder to win. **This book will help you...** - **Challenge and Test Your Characters**. With a vast range of scenarios to choose from, you'll have endless ideas about how to keep your characters on their toes while creating page-turning tension and high stakes. - **Layer Conflict on Multiple Levels**. Learn how to weave conflict into every scene, adding both immediate hurdles and larger, overarching obstacles. - **Drive Inner and Outer Growth**. Each conflict forces your character to confront their fears, face inner struggles, and grow. Or....they'll face crippling failure that sets them back. Either way, each obstacle shines a light on who they really are and the emotional toll of their journey. - **Build a Satisfying Climax**. Get practical tips on orchestrating an unforgettable showdown that has high stakes and escalating tension. - **Create a Story that Stands Out.** Each scenario offers endless options for the minor inconveniences, disastrous results, and inner struggles that could result. No matter what genre you write, you'll find ways to craft a fresh premise for readers to enjoy. ---- ## The Emotion Amplifier Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Stress and Volatility Expanded Second Edition (2024) ISBN 978-1-7361523-3-1 _The Emotion Amplifier Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Stress and Volatility_ takes writers through the disruptive world of amplifiers—specific states or conditions that make it difficult for a character to emotionally self-regulate, setting them up for poor judgment and (hopefully) colossal mistakes they’ll have to fix and learn from. Part how-to, part brainstorming tool, this expanded edition explores 52 unique amplifiers, such as pain, hunger, competition, arousal, and more. **This guide will help you:** - **Showcase a Character's Hidden Emotions**. Emotion amplifiers are designed to strip away your character's self-control so they have difficulty repressing what they feel. As internal strain builds, their true emotions rise up, even when it's not wise or safe to reveal them. - **Write Realistic Responses.** Each amplifier comes with a list of cues for body language, internal sensations, thoughts, vocal cues, and more so you can show the character's heightened emotional reactions in a way that fits who they are and the situation they're in.  - **Add Tension and Conflict.** With over 50 unique amplifiers to choose from (including stress, scrutiny, and mortal peril), it's easy to get a character to take foolhardy risks and make mistakes that will complicate the plot. - **Show Character Arc Growth**. Amplifiers can push your character beyond their limits while also triggering self-awareness and personal development, enabling you to show inner growth as they respond to the mental, physical, or psychological weight of an amplifier.  - **Brainstorm High-Stakes Moments**. Get practical advice on using each amplifier to complicate scenes, increase pressure, and bring out a character's raw emotions. --- ## The Fear Thesaurus: A Writer's Guide to What Holds Characters Back ISBN 978-1-7361523-6-2 Fear is a primal force, a built-in warning system alerting characters to danger. It can push them to protect themselves or trap them, making their deepest insecurities and past trauma loom larger than life. It’s also the underlying current fueling plot and arc—a struggle that must be faced and subdued for characters to reach their goals.   **Inside this guide, you’ll learn to:** - **Master the psychology of fear** so you can show how it distorts perception, hijacks reason, generates false beliefs, and drives the character’s choices and behavior - **Write authentic character struggles** using over 80 in-depth fear profiles that explore possible disruptions to a person’s life, specific triggers, reactions, and internal conflicts - **Use universal fear categories**—Survival, Stability & Control, Relationship, Identity, and Moral & Existential—to plot challenging situations, personal battles, and opportunities for growth - **Pinpoint your character’s greatest fear** by exploring their emotional wounds, secrets, unmet needs, and other related factors - **Identify your character’s fatal flaw**, which is central to their fight with fear and the story’s resolution - **Strengthen story structure** by weaving fear into the main turning points that define a character’s journey Force your characters to face their inner demons while giving readers a front row seat to their own internal battles. _The Fear Thesaurus_ helps you write stories that feel real—where fear shapes choices, fuels transformation, and reveals the courage it takes to change.