100 books like The Synonym Finder

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. 

This American title is at the more academic end of books on swearing and oaths. Mohr shows how obscenity evolves over time. Words now considered indecent were acceptable in the Middle Ages while careless invocations of God and Jesus were taboo (that’s not to say they weren’t used). The very title of the book neatly illustrates a difference between US and British culture, with the asterisk being used to soften potential offence in the States. By contrast in the UK, the word usually appears naked and unashamed on the cover (as in Frankie Boyle’s My Shit Life So Far).

This pocket slang dictionary was given to us as a leaving gift when we waved goodbye to England’s grey skies. It has had me sniggering ever since. I guarantee you’ll never hear sentences like those in Pardon My Spanish at your Spanish class. Oh no. It will teach you essential phrases like ya estoy cansado de ser yo siempre el pagano (I’m fed up with being the stupid mug who always ends up paying) or hoy esta de malas pulgas (she’s really ratty today). Totally invaluable.

Jonathon Green is the doyen of dirty words. Or, more respectfully, he is the premier lexicographer of the graphic, the dubious, and the obscene. For decades Green has been trawling obscure publications and other outré sources for examples of slang in the English language, and publishing dictionaries that are unmatched in their scope and detail. No term, however racist, sexist, classist, or any other kind of -ist, is too small to go unnoticed. In Odd Job Man, a mixture of autobiography and ruminations on bad language, Green describes himself as an ‘anatomist of the underbelly cutting not into ripe cadavers but into riper language.’ It’s a life’s work.

This is a must for any aspiring social scientist. Ironically entitled, the book offers a brilliant account of how many researchers in the social sciences resort to esoteric jargon and abstruse arguments to promote themselves in their academic micro-fiefdoms, defend their areas of expertise from outsiders but also to obfuscate and conceal their own ignorance. The book, however, can also be read on how to write well and get published in the social sciences.

This writing instruction book came to my aid as I began to teach writing at Harvard University in the late 1990s, when I was trying to help college students cultivate their own voice as writers.

The title was brilliant, surprising the reader that the subject was revision and not writing, per se. This focused on a fundamental truth, which is that good writing – whether it be fiction or non-fiction, artistic or professional – almost always goes through several revisions. Students often recoil at the idea of revisions because they threaten to burden them with more work.

What Murray underlined (and a point I’ve reiterated) is that revisions provide the opportunity to improve your work. The more that writers are comfortable with making revisions, the easier it will be to cultivate and improve their voices in their written work.

What terrible tome would Morticia and Gomez have read to little Wednesday in order to ensure that she would have the most noxious nightmares? I believe they would’ve cracked open this gothic children’s classic, written and illustrated by the enigmatic Edward Gorey.

This book recites the alphabet, with each letter representing how a child died. Take, for instance, the representation of our second letter: “B is for Basil assaulted by bears.” What better way for a wicked whelp to learn her letters?

I both chuckled and winced while reading this book, especially with the paired black-and-white illustrations. It’s funny and deeply dark, which is, of course, the perfect mix for an Addams Family fan.