Angela Ackerman Books

Every story begins with a character driven by a need and a goal to fulfill it. Whether seeking love, justice, or freedom, conflict transforms a premise into something unique. Physical obstacles, adversaries, moral dilemmas, and personal struggles not only hinder a character's progress but also facilitate internal growth. The right conflict generates tension and high stakes, challenging characters as they navigate their arcs and keeping readers emotionally engaged. In Volume 1 of The Conflict Thesaurus, you will discover a wealth of conflict options, including relationship friction, moral dilemmas, and no-win scenarios. Each scenario is analyzed to reveal potential complications, internal struggles, and the impact on a character's basic human needs. You'll find guidance on how to use conflict to shape your protagonist's character arc through opportunities for both failure and success. Additionally, there's a master class on internal conflict—its significance and how to weave it into your narrative. The guide also explores the role of conflict in creating high stakes that resonate with the character, enhancing tension for readers. With over 100 entries presented in a user-friendly format, this resource equips you to craft intense, memorable fiction that captivates audiences. Keep the challenges coming to ensure your character works hard for their desires.

"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 feel connected to the story is essential for all writers, yet many overlook the powerful role of setting. A well-chosen location can evoke emotion, create conflict, define characters, reveal backstory, and engage readers through sensory details and deep point of view. This resource offers a comprehensive list of sights, smells, tastes, textures, and sounds for over 120 urban settings. It provides potential sources of conflict for each location, helping you complicate your characters' journeys naturally. You'll find guidance on making descriptions impactful to maintain pacing and keep readers engaged, as well as tips on using the five senses to enhance emotional resonance. The material also covers how to use settings to develop characters through personalization and emotional values, while employing emotional triggers to influence their choices. Additionally, it addresses specific challenges of writing urban environments and highlights common descriptive pitfalls to avoid. With downloadable tools for planning each setting, you can select the most effective backdrop for your scenes, ensuring a rich and immersive experience that will draw readers back even after they finish the book.

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.