I recently had a conversation with young-adult fiction author Suzanne Goldsmith ("Washashore") about finding actions for characters that suggest emotions, to avoid the need to directly name the emotion a character is feeling and thereby fall into the trap of telling rather than showing. Too often, I resort to a few physical manifestations; drumming fingers for nervousness, pinched eyebrows for suspicion, dodging eye contact for deceit. Over the years, I've tried to expand my collection of such physical cues to avoid repetition. Now I've come across the book The Emotion Thesaurus by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi, a whole volume filled with physical cues for a variety of emotions.
It should feel like a gift from above. Now I need only define the emotion the character is experiencing and refer to the book, choosing from among dozens of possible actions to suggest the emotion. But it doesn't feel like a gift. I feel guilt (averting your gaze, blushing, sweating, lip biting, repetitive swallowing), as though I had cribbed a doctoral thesis. Perhaps I'll get over it; after all, I have no problem referring to a traditional thesaurus, and I certainly accept ideas from my writing group.
Perhaps you feel differently. Either way, the book has value in illuminating all the ways a deft writer can develop character without resorting to telling.
