Donovan - MASTER LISTS FOR WRITERS: Thesauruses, Plots, Character Traits, Names, and More

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Master Lists for Writers Copyright 2015 by Munds Park Publishing All rights reserved bryndonovan.com
First edition, October 2015 ISBN: 978-0-9967152-0-1 No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in print or electronic form without prior permission of the author. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS As I wrote this book, I was blessed with the enthusiastic moral support of my family, my real life friends, including the Scoobies, and my online communitiesthe Lentils, the Binders, and the NaNoWriMo group. I appreciate you all so much. I also want to thank the readers and followers of my blog, bryndonovan.com. I would like to give special appreciation to Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Robert Hass for his permission to quote his poem in this book. Most of all, I owe so much to Gill Donovan, a wonderful writer, a smart editor, the kindest human being I have ever met, and my soul mate.

I love you, darling.

DESCRIPTIONS Its very important for most readers to be able to picture characters and items in a scene clearly in their heads. Writers also need good descriptions of facial expressions, body language, and gestures to convey emotions and to set up lines of dialogue without always having to write said or any of its synonyms. Sometimes, we need fresh ways to describe emotions directly. Its easy for us to rely on the same handful of descriptions. We can also lose our writing momentum when we take a long time trying to think of the right word or phrase. This section can make that process quicker and easier.

DESCRIPTIONS OF FACIAL EXPRESSIONS Ive categorized these expressions under positive and neutral (neutral meaning things like surprise and curiosity) and negative. I havent organized them according to particular emotion, because so many of them work for more than one. A person might narrow his eyes out of vindictiveness or skepticism, for instance, and his face might turn red out of anger or embarrassment. Some of these require a little more explanation on your part. Youll have to say what shes glaring at, or if his face is contorting in rage, or grief, or what. And not all of these will work for every characterit depends on what the character looks like and how she generally reacts to things.

Some of these arent exactly facial expressions, but still useful for dialogue tags. In many cases Ive given several ways to describe the same thing. While I have included some longer phrases, they are not proprietary and its fine to use them.