Let me preface this post by saying that calling the tools I use to (hopefully) make me a better writer "cheats" is a bit tongue in cheek. I've never actually come across writers who think using a thesaurus is a short cut, but I've read quite a few that I wish would use one. That being said, I've decided to blog about the tools I use in the hopes of not being one of those writers.
I tweeted about this earlier (@MaraValderran for those who want to follow), but I'll elaborate here. In scouring the B&N store on my Nook, I came across this wifty book called The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer's Guide to Character Expression by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi (available on the Nook and Kindle as well as hardcopy). I have to say that this book has been my saving grace for some really sticky points in my books. I'm a very conversational and dialogue driven writer, so when you get down to descriptors I am usually banging my head against the keyboard with a lot of choice expletives, but not exactly the kind of words I'm searching for. This book has really helped me to expand on the way I describe the emotions of my characters so that I am not depending on the dialogue so heavily and I am not resorting to just telling the reader how my characters are feeling ("He was sad. He cried."=lame). Instead, I can look up "sadness" from the list of emotions they give you in the contents, and find the physical signs of sadness, the internal sensations, the mental responses, cues of acute or long term sadness, cues of suppressed sadness, and even what sadness might escalate to.
