The best reference and writing books for romance authors

Romance is all about feelings. The highs. The lows. The dejection and the joys. But you need to “show” and not “tell” how your characters are feeling.

To do that, you use gestures, dialogue, facial expressions, internal sensations, and thoughts. The Emotion Thesaurus provides all that and more. There are more than 130 entries to help writers show emotion. This is a fantastic book for all novel genres. If I could only keep one reference book (other than mine), this would be it!

I was so thrilled when I found this little gem. I had been desperately searching for a book like this!

Authors use body language to show emotion and to use as dialogue tags. But in typical nonfiction books on body language you have to weed through a lot of psychological explanation to find the gesture. Author Tim Ellis did the work for us. This book lists just the gestures and expressions for emotions from A to Z.

My copy is paperback; unfortunately, the author has since passed away, and only the Kindle version is available now.

A trope is a common plot device used in fiction, such as the billionaire hero, fated mates, secret baby, fake relationship. Even before I knew what a trope was, I was using them.

The Trope Thesaurus is more than a listing of common tropes, it also explains how to creatively and effectively use them to create conflict and to plot your fiction. The author gives examples in romance, mystery, suspense, thriller, science fiction, and fantasy. If you’re ever stuck for a plot idea, check out this book.

Think of Master Lists for Writers as a collection of mini thesauri on topics of interest to writers including plot twists, settings, body language, character names, action scene words, funny plots, workplace plots, character quirks, and much more.

Many of the subjects could merit a book in and of themselves, so rather than an exhaustive list of words, Master Lists provides a high-level summary of the most common terms in each category. Often, that’s enough. I sometimes use this book for inspiration. 

If you want a general thesaurus, I believe The Synonym Finder with more than 1 million synonyms is the best one on the market.

I’ve used it for more than 30 years and had to replace my original copy because it was so well-used, it fell apart. What makes this thesaurus stand out is the quality of synonyms and the ease of use. It is super easy to find the words you’re looking for. Every author should have this book!