Trait Thesauri

I recently found this crazy collection of thesauri for writers and fell in love as soon as I got them. I'll review the others, but I'm going to start with my very favorite pair from the collection:

The Positive Trait Thesaurus and The Negative Trait Thesaurus (by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi)

These two books go through building a character from the ground up. But they give you such specific traits, the way those traits reveal themselves in actions, other traits that would complement them, and characters with traits that would naturally clash with them. Instead of saying you want your character to be "kind", you can now have a character who is altruistic, empathetic, generous and then open your negative trait thesaurus and add in a little bit of passivity to a fault.

The most fun part of these, whether you're a writer or not, is seeing the real life examples from screen and literature of who has these traits. And it really makes you think! You wouldn't naturally equate Mr. Spock from Star Trek and Mr. Miyagi. But they both are calm. Or Jerry Maguire and Mahatma Gandhi...they're both generous. Even if you're not a writer, these are FUN books to look through and learn about what makes people tick. I can't recommend them highly enough! I used them to flesh out the character I'm writing now and she went from pretty bland, to a really deep soul to write about. She's a true empath, and she's paired with a hero who is deeply wounded. The pairing came straight from flipping through these thesauri.

Let me know if you take a look at them, I'd love to hear your thoughts!