If you love the Emotion Thesaurus, you’ve got to add
Body Beats To Build On alongside it in your writers’ tool chest. I just finished another round of rewrites on my work-in-progress. This time, I kept Body Beats beside me, and what a difference it made, as I was sweeping through the work looking for ways to tighten and heighten the emotional impact of the story.
Where the Emotion Thesaurus gives boat loads of ideas on ways our bodies react inwardly and outwardly to different emotions,
Body Beats To Build On takes those actions and turns them into short, vivid descriptors, based upon different body parts and systems. Here are a few examples just based upon a few negative responses with the eyes:
*his sight was peppery
*the thrust of his gaze
*muscle twitched beneath his eye
*wielded her most cutting glare
*poison-tipped glare…
and these are only the beginning. (I really appreciated the section on the internal body systems, such as heart and veins.)
Body Beats addresses movement, frame and posture, skin, breathing, appendages, nose, ears, throat, non-facial expressions, and more. There’s even bonus material on Dialogue Tags.
I used the Kindle version of the book, which was very easy to jump around in. Sometimes using e-books as reference tools is difficult, but not Body Beats. It’s a little, straight-forward book, and I highly recommend it for every striving or established author.
