The Emotional Wound Thesaurus: A Writer's Guide to Psychological Trauma
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $8.99
-
- $8.99
Publisher Description
Readers connect to characters with depth, ones who have experienced life’s ups and downs. To deliver key players that are both realistic and compelling, writers must know them intimately—not only who they are in the present story, but also what made them that way. Of all the formative experiences in a character’s past, none are more destructive than emotional wounds. The aftershocks of trauma can change who they are, alter what they believe, and sabotage their ability to achieve meaningful goals, all of which will affect the trajectory of your story.
DIG DEEP TO UNCOVER YOUR CHARACTER’S PAST
Identifying the backstory wound is crucial to understanding how it will shape your character’s behavior, and The Emotional Wound Thesaurus can help. Inside, you’ll find:
•A database of traumatic situations common to the human experience
•An in-depth study on a wound’s impact, including the fears, lies, personality shifts, and dysfunctional behaviors that can arise from different painful events
•An extensive analysis of character arc and how the wound and any resulting unmet needs fit into it
•Techniques on how to show the past experience to readers in a way that is both engaging and revelatory while avoiding the pitfalls of info dumps and telling
•A showcase of popular characters and how their traumatic experiences reshaped them, leading to very specific story goals
•A Backstory Wound Profile tool that will enable you to document your characters’ negative past experiences and the aftereffects
Root your characters in reality by giving them an authentic wound that causes difficulties and prompts them to strive for inner growth to overcome it. With its easy-to-read format and over 100 entries packed with information, The Emotional Wound Thesaurus is a crash course in psychology for creating characters that feel incredibly real to readers.
Customer Reviews
A must have for all fiction writers
I love this series of books and have them all in my reference library. The latest volume The Emotional Wound Thesaurus: A Writer's Guide to Psychological Trauma, is the best so far. Perfect for character driven stories, the Emotional Wound Thesaurus will help you brainstorm your characters past, their emotional conflict and what motivates their actions and behaviours.
The introductory pages—an excellent craft book in itself—explore the impact of an emotional wound on the character's personality, their behaviour and their arc, the villains journey and factors that impact on a character's wound, as well as brainstorming the character's wound and showing the wound through behavior.
The thesaurus itself, like previous volumes, is laid out in sections and covers an range of over one hundred emotional wounds from being stalked to growing up in a cult through infertility and having to kill to survive. More common wounds are also explored, for example, being bullied, divorce, a miscarriage or suicide of a loved one, to name a few.
Each wound is explored with examples, false beliefs stemming from the wound, what the character may fear, personality traits associated with that wound, triggers and how the character might overcome the specific wound.
The appendices feature helpful flowcharts and wound profile questionnaire and an extensive recommended reading list.
This really useful resource would appeal to all fiction writers, whatever the genre. I found it invaluable for my current work in progress and will use it for every future book I write.