The Emotional Wound Thesaurus by Becca Puglisi & Angela Ackerman

If you're serious about your writing and thus focused on creating fictional characters that sparkle and leap off the page and leave your readers wanting to read more of your books, then you will be focused on honing your writing craft. That's when you need to give your characters a backstory that includes wounds, lies and secrets.

After you've read about how to create wounds and lies, another fantastic writing guide by Angela Ackerman, and her co-writer, Becca Puglisi, you may be wondering how on earth you'll find the inspiration for creating a wound that will have an impact on your character's journey.

That's where The Emotional Wound Thesaurus steps in and takes over.

Creating Emotional Wounds

Identifying the backstory wound is crucial to understanding how it will shape your character's behaviour. Cue The Emotional Wound Thesaurus and you'll have all the emotional wounds for creating characters.

Readers connect to characters with deep emotional issues. Things that have given them ups and downs in their lives. Not just little issues to ride out, but also deep scars they may hold hidden in their hearts.

These readers want to take an emotional journey with your characters. So give that to them!

Know Your Character Intimately

To deliver these fictional people, your job as a writer is to make them realistic and compelling and give them emotions that real people feel.

Before you can pull off such a feat, you need to create fictional characters that you know intimately, as you know certain members of your family or your closest friends. You need to give them a backstory and history that caused them to be the way they are when they enter your book.

Angela and Becca believe that of all the formative experiences in a character's past, none are more destructive than emotional wounds. They say ...

The aftershocks of trauma can change who your characters are, alter what they believe, and sabotage their ability to achieve meaningful goals, all of which will affect the path your story takes.

This writing guide duo encourage writers to root fictional characters in reality by giving them an authentic wound that causes difficulties and prompts them to strive for inner growth to overcome the emotional wounds. That's exactly the same for humans. We need to grow as people and to do that we need to overcome those traumas from our past.

Your Character's Psychology

It's your character's psychology that needs to be fleshed out, and you can do that easily with The Emotional Wound Thesaurus.

This whopping list of traumatic situations is an in-depth study on how an emotional wound's impact on a person's life. It includes the fears, lies, personality shifts, and dysfunctional behaviours that can arise from different painful experiences that life throws at us. Use any of these wounds that we humans face and you'll have a fully rounded fictional character who feels things that we humans feel.

The Emotional Wound Thesaurus also gives writers an extensive analysis of a character arc and how the wound that you have chosen for your character will affect their character's journey.

When creating fictional characters a writer needs a steaming hot arsenal and you really, really can't go wrong with the series of writing guides that Angela and Becca have created for writers.

The Emotional Wound Thesaurus has over 100 entries packed with information that will lead you to creating a complex psychology for your characters that will that feel incredibly real to readers. That's what we all want, right? For a reader to feel so close to the character we have created, that when the book ends they don't want to leave the story. Achieve that, and you'll be a successful writer!