Writing is a hard mission. Not like getting food off a truck in Gaza, or rebuilding a life of memorabilia after an LA wildfire. Creating a world or illustrating a mission, fiction and nonfiction, feels hard on first draft, through. We’re tempted to use a tool to make the early work easier, and I think we all know what tool I mean.
But the work on the second draft can be no easier, just difficult in a different way. There’s nothing wrong or bad with something being hard to do. One of my favorite lines about overcoming odds comes from the film A League of Their Own. Dottie is a spectacular catcher in the women’s baseball league, but she wants to quit and get back to being a wife. Her husband is back from the war and injured. She tells her manager, “It’s just too hard” to be a woman and ballplayer.
“Of course it’s hard,” says her manager Tom Hanks. “If it was easy, anyone could do it. The hard is what makes it good.” But there are things that make the hard a little easier, especially on revisions. You know, revision, where the books really peck through their shells to first spread their wings.
The Emotion Thesaurus is one of those make-easier things. The book came out in 2012 and has been revised into a bigger version. I got the upgrade from a friend for a birthday present and could then gift my earlier edition out to a promising author who’s ready for the power of a thesaurus. There’s that joke about the thesaurus being a kind of writing dinosaur. This one is different, because its major arcana are emotions. Happiness. Depression. Desire. Homesickness. One hundred and ninety of them.
Get into the Humanity
In each two-page entry, the authors of the book detail the physical signals, behaviors, sensations, and mental responses for the emotion. Then there’s a list of Associated Power Verbs. I use this tool in several ways. I revise the first draft writing that needs more life. I also know what a character will encounter in a scene, and read the thesaurus first before I write, to carry the emotion into the storytelling. Sometimes, I use this reference as a way to enrich the writing beyond generalizations. “He smiled” is a placeholder. “He broke into a grin that filled his face” is more graphic.
Knowing what to try, and what to replace, is a very human task. AI did not build The Emotion Thesaurus. Angela Ackerman and Theresa Puglisi did that, then made it 80 percent bigger seven years later. Yeah, they’re novelists.
Today authors are creating novels using AI as a tool. It’s a discussion that can fill an evening about whether the software entities we call Claude and Gemini are cheats or cameras, capturing words we’ll rearrange. When AI can absorb how to use The Emotion Thesaurus, we’ll have a new level of tool to use. Still, we must make the choices first about what to try. That line about filling a face with a grin is not all that great. Making it great is what the thesaurus is after. We get to make choices as creators. Not everybody gets a shot at that kind of fun, another place to practice being alive.
