The first week of December is behind us, but these stocking stuffers are yours to enjoy, so if you haven’t collected all four, now’s your chance.
Stocking Stuffer #1: A brainstorming list of everyday ’emotional situations’ that will draw readers in closer to your characters. Use these to generate empathy!
Stocking Stuffer #2: A brainstorming list of healthy and dysfunctional ways for characters to resolve conflict. Use them to show their growth or to take things from bad to worse!
Stocking Stuffer #3: A brainstorming list of good qualities to give to your antagonist so they are more formidable and interesting rather than flat, boring baddies.
Stocking Stuffer #4: A brainstorming list of ideas on how to build mood using the setting. Make every scene pop!
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might need these lists!
We hope you find these helpful, and they generate lots of ideas.
And if you need more help, we have a series of writing guides that may help you.
These are part how-to, part brainstorming tool, and will help you master different areas of description:
The Emotion Thesaurus can help you strengthen each emotional moment by helping you brainstorm authentic responses and reactions that fits your character.
The Emotional Wound Thesaurus makes character building easier by showing how painful experiences can shape who a person becomes and steer how they’ll behave. With a deeper understanding of your character’s specific past pain, you’ll know what motivates them, what they fear, and the types of struggles they’ll have in the story. Readers love characters with true depth!
The Positive Trait Thesaurus helps you create characters readers will connect to. Dive into 100 personality traits that showcase your character’s strengths, identity, and other qualities that can set them up for success. (Don’t forget your darker characters. They need positive traits, too!)
The Negative Trait Thesaurus helps you design your character’s darker half–flaws that trip them up, cause problems in relationships, and hold them back from happiness and success. Along with the Positive Trait guidebook, you’ll build balanced, realistic characters who feel like they’ve stepped out of the real world.
The Occupation Thesaurus dives into one of the best details for revealing characterization through show, don’t tell: the character’s work. Find the perfect job that will seed hints with readers about the character’s personality, skills, interests, priorities, beliefs, fears, and more.
The Conflict Thesaurus Volume 1 (Gold) will help you activate the power of conflict in your story, showing you how to design meaningful problems and challenges to push characters out of their comfort zones and toward a path of growth and change. Brainstorm the right scenario with over 100 endlessly customizable thesaurus entries.
The Conflict Thesaurus Volume 2 (Silver) shows how conflict is the golden thread that binds plot to arc, providing the complications, setbacks, and derailments that make the character’s inner and outer journeys dynamic. With 100+ additional conflict scenarios in this volume, brainstorming the perfect danger, power struggle, or threat to deepen your story is easy.
The Urban Setting Thesaurus is the key to creating stronger, more powerful descriptions through the use of multi-sensory details that will draw readers in and enhance the story. Discover how to choose the right locations for your scenes, how the setting can be used to characterize, reveal backstory, and provide triggers that can amplify character emotions and drive behavior.
The Rural Setting Thesaurus has over 100 settings and plenty of how-to help on using figurative language to create vivid imagery and symbolic meaning. It also includes lessons on using the setting to steer plot, provide conflict through story-specific challenges, and influence emotions through mood.
