The Emotion Amplifier Thesaurus (May 2024 Release)

We’re adding to our Thesaurus family!

It’s been a while since our last book as we needed to recalibrate our release schedule from fall to spring (resulting in a year gap), but now we’re back in the thesaurus-making saddle. May 13th is coming fast, so it’s time to dish some details about our next writing guide!

First up…the cover!

As this is an upgraded second edition and companion to The Emotion Thesaurus, we wanted the style of the books to match. This book is now a true thesaurus, packed with incredible help to showcase your character’s emotional state and help readers feel closer to your characters. More on that in a minute.

Next, the back jacket.

THE EMOTION AMPLIFIER THESAURUS:
A Writer’s Guide to Character Stress and Volatility

STRESS YOUR CHARACTERS TO THEIR LIMITS 

Characters who are in control of their emotions rarely slip up, which makes for boring reading. To avoid that pitfall, channel your dark side and introduce stress that will make it harder for them to think clearly. Your weapon of choice? An amplifier. Pain, arousal, dehydration—conditions and states like these make it difficult for a character to emotionally self-regulate, setting them up for overreactions, misjudgments, and (hopefully) colossal mistakes they’ll have to fix and learn from. 

Inside The Emotion Amplifier Thesaurus, you’ll find: 

• A deep dive into cognitive and emotional dissonance and how psychological discomfort steers a character’s reasoning and impacts their ability to make decisions
• Information on emotional stress as a trigger for self-awareness and personal growth, which makes amplifiers powerful levers to help steer story structure and character arc
• Lists of body language cues, internal sensations, thoughts, and other descriptives to show the effects of more than 50 amplifiers
• Brainstorming help on how to use each amplifier to generate tension and complication, apply everyday pressure, and make a character emotionally volatile
• Fifty-two bonus writing tips to help you wield amplifiers with skill and precision, taking your scenes from good to great

Push your characters. Give them no quarter. Use physical, cognitive, and psychological strain to force them to face their mistakes, acknowledge their true feelings, and work through the contradictions at the heart of every inner struggle. 

How is this book a “companion” to The Emotion Thesaurus?

When we were building the original Emotion Thesaurus, writers would ask us to cover specific emotions only some were not feelings at all, rather more states of being that had the ability to disrupt and amplify whatever the character was feeling. So, we created a quick mini booklet in the same style as The Emotion Thesaurus for 15 states like Boredom, Pain, and Stress. Now, that mini-guide has been expanded to over 50 states and conditions that will challenge your character’s ability to control their emotions, and it is packed with knowledge on how to use them to create bigger emotional moments that readers will feel part of.

I have the original ebooklet. How is this guide different?

Great question! Our original Emotion Amplifier ebooklet (45 pages) was a bare-bones guide, intended to provide quick help for describing common states like pain, illness, hunger, etc. that are often mistaken for emotions. It contained a brief how-to and 15 entries. This second edition (~200 pages) is a true deep dive into this storytelling element to show you just how powerful amplifiers are. This guide shows you how to use them to destabilize a character’s emotions, generate conflict, support story structure, and most importantly, bring readers inside your character’s emotional experience using common human struggles and internal turmoil. We’ve expanded the thesaurus to cover over 50 amplifiers, and for the first time ever, each entry has three pages of brainstorming material, not two. Because emotion amplifiers are so versatile and perfect for unlocking a character’s psychological state to create intimacy with readers, we couldn’t contain our lists to two pages.

Will there be a preorder?

Sorry, no. We’ve tried a preorder in the past, but a certain online store made a mess of it (costing us hundreds of sales), so we’d rather not have that happen again. But if you’d like a notification as soon as the book is out, add your email here. (If you’ve done so in the past, you won’t need to do so again.)

Are you giving out ARCs?

We do have 50 digital ARCs, and as we do at every launch, we’ll be drawing names from our lovely Street Team who have expressed a desire to review the book, whether they win an Arc or purchase the book.

Do you have a Street Team?

Yes, yes, and YES! The window to join has closed, but I hope you’ll consider joining us for the next book launch!

Can I access The Emotion Amplifier Thesaurus at One Stop for Writers?

Yes! We’ll be updating this database closer to May with the additional entries, but you can see the current list of emotion amplifiers here. (If you’d like to poke around & view the entire THESAURUS DATABASE in full, we recommend starting a 2-week free trial.)

Did we miss a question? If so, please ask, and we’ll be happy to answer!

Thanks so much for always supporting us. May 13th will be here soon, and we can’t wait. We hope this book is everything you need and more!

Click here to be notified when this book releases.