Angela Ackerman Bücher

Every story starts with a character who is motivated by a need and has a goal that can resolve it. Whether their objective is to find a life partner, bring a killer to justice, overthrow a cruel regime, or something else, conflict transforms a story premise into something fresh. Physical obstacles, adversaries, moral dilemmas, deep-seated doubts and personal struggles...these not only block a character's external progress, they become a gateway for internal growth. The right conflict will build tension and high stakes, challenge characters as they traverse their arcs, and most importantly, keep readers emotionally invested from beginning to end. Inside Volume 1 of The Conflict Thesaurus, you'll find: A myriad of conflict options in the form of relationship friction, failures and mistakes, moral dilemmas and temptations, pressure and ticking clocks, and no-win scenarios. An analysis of each scenario that maps out possible complications and catastrophes, internal struggles, and the stressful impacts on a character's basic human needs. Guidance on using conflict to influence your protagonist's character arc through opportunities for failure and success. Master class instruction on internal conflict: what it is, why it's important, and how to incorporate it at the scene and story levels. Information about the role conflict plays in generating high stakes that are personally significant to the character, upping the tension for readers. A breakdown of the various adversaries your character might encounter along the way. Don't give your character a break. Keep the hits coming with a variety of obstacles that will force them to work harder to get what they want. With over 100 entries arranged in a user-friendly format, The Conflict Thesaurus is the guide you need to write intense and satisfying fiction readers won't forget

"Inside The Positive Trait Thesaurus, you'll find a large selection of attributes to choose from when building a personality profile, real character examples from literature, film, or television to show how an attribute drives actions and decisions, influences goals, and steers relationships, advice on using positive traits to immediately hook readers while avoiding common personality pitfalls, insight on human needs and morality, and how each determines the strengths that emerge in heroes and villains alike, information on the key role positive attributes play within the character arc, and how they're vital to overcoming fatal flaws and achieving success, and downloadable tools for organizing a character's attributes and providing a deeper understanding of his past, his needs, and his emotional wounds."--

Highlights seventy-five emotions and identifies the body language and cues that authors can use to elicit each in their characters. -- provided by publisher.

"Making readers care and feel like they're part of the story should be the number one goal for all writers. Ironically, many storytellers fail to maximize one of fiction's most powerful elements to achieve this: the setting. Not only can the right location become a conduit for emotion, it can also provide conflict, characterize the story's cast, reveal significant backstory, and trigger the reader's own emotional memories through sensory details and deep point of view. Inside The Urban Thesaurus, you'll find: a list of the sights, smells, tastes, textures, and sounds for over 120 urban settings; possible sources of conflict for each location to help you brainstorm ways to naturally complicate matters for your characters; advice on how to make every piece of description count so you can maintain the right pace and keep readers engaged; tips on utilizing the five senses to encourage readers to more fully experience each moment by triggering their own emotional memories; information on how to use the setting to characterize a story's cast through personalization and emotional values while using emotional triggers to steer their decisions; a review of specific challenges that arise when writing urban locations, along with common descriptive pitfalls that should be avoided; downloadable tools to help you plan each setting so you can choose the right one for a scene, providing the biggest storytelling punch. The Urban Setting Thesaurus helps you tailor each setting to your characters while creating a realistic, textured world readers will long to return to, even after the book closes."--Publisher information

Within the pages of a book lives a place of a writer's imagining, one that has the ability to pull readers in on a visceral level. But the audience's emotional fascination will only last if the author is able to describe this vibrant world and its inhabitants well. The setting is the unique story element that brings together characters and events. So much more than stage dressing, the setting is able to evoke mood, provide unique challenges that force the hero to acknowledge his faults and fight for what he wants, and hold a mirror up to his emotions, peeling back the layers of his most intimate feelings, fears, and desires.

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 a story. Enter The Emotional Wound Thesaurus, which explores over 100 possible traumatic experiences from a character¿s past and how they can impact the character in the present. Armed with this unique resource, authors will be able to root their characters in reality by giving them an authentic wound that causes difficulties and prompts them to strive for inner growth to overcome it.