Becca Puglisi – Why Your Characters Keep Shrugging (And How to Fix It with The Emotion Thesaurus)

Becca Puglisi is an international speaker and bestselling author who has sold over one million copies of her Thesaurus series, with The Emotion Thesaurus being her flagship book. Starting as critique partners on Critique Circle, Becca and co-author Angela Ackerman discovered they both struggled with showing character emotions—Becca's characters were always shrugging and shuffling their feet. This led them to create lists of emotional cues that eventually became blog posts on Writers Helping Writers, then transformed into The Emotion Thesaurus when readers demanded a book version. A former first-grade teacher, Becca brings educational expertise to her workshops and tools, now available through One Stop for Writers, a subscription-based service with character-building tools based on the Thesaurus series content.

In this episode:

• How The Emotion Thesaurus solved the "shrugging and shuffling" problem
• Why every character responds to emotions differently based on personality
• Mining movies, books, and real-life observations for authentic emotions
• Stephen King's skill at creating compelling, realistic antagonists
• The importance of wounding events from backstory shaping current behavior
• Reserved vs demonstrative: the emotional spectrum for your character
• Physical cues, internal thoughts, and visceral sensations in showing emotion
• Hidden emotions: what characters show others vs what readers see
• Emotion escalation and de-escalation to avoid jarring jumps
• Melodrama vs not enough emotion: finding the right balance
• The Emotional Wound Thesaurus for character change arcs
• The Conflict Thesaurus for plotting and creating choice opportunities
• Building characters as mixed bags of positive and negative traits
• The Fear Thesaurus (Spring 2025): how fear drives character behavior and arc
• One Stop for Writers: subscription tools based on Thesaurus content

Resources mentioned:

• Writers Helping Writers blog: writershelpingwriters.org
• One Stop for Writers (subscription service): onestopforwriters.com
• Critique Circle
• The Emotion Thesaurus by Becca Puglisi and Angela Ackerman: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1475004958?&linkCode=ll1&tag=pubperf-20&linkId=400c65572fa1761b41f901ed6233057c&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl
• The Negative Trait Thesaurus
• The Positive Trait Thesaurus
• The Emotional Wound Thesaurus
• The Setting Thesaurus (multiple books)
• The Conflict Thesaurus (two books)
• The Fear Thesaurus (coming Spring 2025)

Connect with Becca Puglisi:

• Writers Helping Writers blog: writershelpingwriters.org
• One Stop for Writers: onestopforwriters.com

Connect with Teddy Smith:

• @teddyagsmith
• Website: https://publishingperformance.com/?ref=ywm3mtc
• Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/publishingperformance/
• Pinterest - https://nz.pinterest.com/publishingperformance/
• Instagram - https://instagram.com/publishingperformanceinsta
• Youtube -https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHV6ltaUB4SULkU6JEMhFSw
• Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/company/publishing-performance/

Transcript

Teddy Smith (00:00)
Hi everyone and welcome to the Publishing Format Show. Today I'm delighted to be joined by Becca Puglisi, who's an international writer and speaker and sold over a million copies of her book and the book we're mostly going to be talking about today, which is The Emotions Thesaurus. So thank you for joining me Becca.

Becca Puglisi (00:14)
Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.

Teddy Smith (00:16)
No problem. So I just want to jump straight into it.

What was it that inspired you to write the emotions of the Taurus in the first place?

Becca Puglisi (00:23)
It was actually a problem with my own writing. Angela and I started as critique partners. We met at the critique circle, which is an online place where people can go and submit their work and find people who, you know, want to get a critique partner and want to be able to critique other people's work. And that's where we met. We were each writing our own fiction and we each noticed that

our characters were doing the same thing. They were each doing different things, but like my characters were always shrugging and shuffling their feet. And like, I could not figure out another way to show, you know, when a character was uncomfortable or when a character was confused, I kept falling back on the same cues and she was having the same problem with other things that her characters were doing. And when we talked to our critique group, they were all having that same problem. Like how do we show an emotion? You know, I mean, we have these certain things, but we don't have any other ideas. And so,

Angela and I started just creating these lists of emotions. This is what is happening when a person is feeling angry, like what's happening to their face, what's happening to their posture, what's happening to their voice, just so we would have ideas to pull from. And that's kind of where it started. was like, we just had this problem ourselves. And then when we decided to start a blog later, we thought, well, this seems to be kind of a problem that a lot of people struggle with. Maybe writers would be interested in.

seeing these lists that we've made. So we started calling it an emotion thesaurus and we would highlight one emotion each week. And just, you know, with body cues, with internal thoughts that the character might be having when they're having that emotion, those internal visceral sensations that they feel, we were just highlighting one emotion a week and.

people started coming to the blog. I mean, they were like really interested in it. And so we did a whole bunch of emotions and then people started saying, hold on, I need this in a book. You have to put this in a book. And we thought, oh my gosh, okay, well, we'll write a book. And so we did, we put it in a book and we published it and it really kind of took off. And we just realized that we had stumbled on something that was a universal problem that all writers have at some point, they have to figure out.

Teddy Smith (02:11)
.

Becca Puglisi (02:26)
how to show their characters emotions. The whole show don't tell thing is one of those, I think, light bulb moments that people have at every point in their writing journey where they have to figure out how to show instead of tell. the same is true with emotions. And that's what the emotion disorder is about and where it came from.

Teddy Smith (02:43)
Yeah, so basically you wrote it as a tool for yourself and then as a result it became useful. When you were writing and you found yourself repeating those same emotions over and over again or the same sort of actions, how did you find yourself referring to the emotions thesaurus? How did you find yourself actually using it in reality?

Becca Puglisi (02:47)
Yeah, 100%.

So we started, like I would look at my list and I would realize, okay, so there's some things here that are good, but they didn't all fit my particular character. And that was kind of a key moment because you have to realize that the way your character responds to what you throw at them, the way that their emotions manifest is gonna be different for every single character. A lot of it's based in personality.

⁓ It's based in the characters emotional range, you know, are they really expressive and demonstrative or are they kind of more introverted shy reserved? And there's just so many factors that influence how your character responds to emotion. So we started, we would look at the list and, and I would then think, okay, well, this is something that might work for my character, but they're going to do it slightly differently. Like they're not going to have that exact response. And so I would tailor it to my character. And that's how we,

encourage people to use the emotion thesaurus that it's not something that's meant to just copy paste You know these physical reactions and put it in your manuscript You want to really tailor it to your character and make sure that it's how your character would respond Because you know them well enough to know exactly what their emotional responses are going to be and kind of what their tendencies are going to be

Teddy Smith (04:14)
Yeah, definitely. Now, when you came to ⁓ actually writing that book, was it difficult trying to get all of the emotions out of yourself into the paper?

Becca Puglisi (04:24)
Thank you.

⁓ it was a little challenging, but it was really helpful having two of us because there's like two different pools to pull from, you know, I mean, I would make a list and she would make a list and then we would compare them. And, you know, she had things that I didn't have. And so we were able to come up with a pretty good list that way. We also watched, I've watched a lot of movies, you know, cause actors, this is what they do. They get paid to basically pretend that they're feeling a certain emotion and they're really good at knowing how to do that.

So watching movies, reading books, seeing how other authors are describing those emotions, and also looking at other people. When you're observing other people and seeing what they're doing in those moments of emotion, it's hard to do, because when people are in a really emotional state, the last thing you want to do is stare at them. But we eavesdrop, we listen, and it's really, really helpful to be able to see

Teddy Smith (05:07)
Okay. Yeah.

Becca Puglisi (05:22)
what is happening, you know, when somebody is experiencing fear or anger or frustration or sadness. That's kind of something that we, you know, we need to be able to really see and ⁓ to understand what it looks like and what's happening with people so that we can then transfer that into our own writing. And that's how we came up with the information in the book.

Teddy Smith (05:29)
Yeah.

Yeah. That show not tell part is really important. I was, I've spoken to a few voiceover artists on here who do the audio books for quite high level books. You know, people like Lee Child and books like that. And they mark up.

books in the same way they mark up scripts to try and show that emotion even just when they're reading it. So I think getting it out on paper is really difficult. And I think

Becca Puglisi (06:04)
Yeah.

Teddy Smith (06:06)
people building those rounded characters, that's one of the questions I get asked the most by people when they ask questions to guests on the show. So were there any authors that you took inspiration from who are really good at writing characters that you think other people could learn from?

Becca Puglisi (06:21)
my gosh. You know, think a lot of people really do that well. And I think it's one of those things that you don't notice when it's done well. You just come away from the book like having fallen in love with it and had this really satisfactory experience reading it and maybe thinking about it afterwards.

I think Stephen King is really good at this. think he's good at creating, the antagonists that he has in his books are, they're very interesting. They're not cardboard. They're not, most of them, know, evil for evil's sake. have reasons why they are the way that they are. And they're really compelling. They're, some of them are, you know, a lot of times I read

Teddy Smith (06:50)
You You

Becca Puglisi (07:06)
scary stories and the things that are supposed to be scary really aren't that scary to me, but a lot of his antagonists are really creepy and like unsettling. I think that he's really good at that.

I think the key is that when you come away from a story and you're thinking about that character and when you're reading the story, when you are...

you're really kind of, you're so connected with them. You're kind of walking through their journey with them. And again, that's that thing that you don't really notice when it's happening, because you're so invested and you're so involved in the story. But really, I think a lot of times when that happens, it's because the character has been drawn really well. They're realistic. They've been drawn consistently so that they're just really easy to see as a real person.

Teddy Smith (07:52)
Hmm

Becca Puglisi (07:53)
The relatability

too, I think is really important is making sure that you're writing characters that many people can relate to in some way. there are ways that you can do that. It's hard because everybody's from different cultures and different backgrounds and different ages, lots of things that make people very different in their experience and who they're going to be drawn to. But you can add certain things in to make a character relatable. You can use vulnerability. You can use

certain likable traits that people are drawn to. But I think those things are really important when you're trying to create a good character that everybody's gonna kind of be drawn to.

Teddy Smith (08:31)
Yeah, when you're taking those points you just made about the building the layers and the vulnerabilities and things like that, do you plan those into the plots of books you're writing, like to make sure that those different personality types come across?

Becca Puglisi (08:48)
I personally always start with, I start with a what if question. That's kind of how my story ideas come about. And then I build the characters in to fit the story. In that situation, I do have to think about the story goal, what the character's story goal is and making sure that they have character traits that are going to both help them achieve that goal, but also,

they're gonna get in the way of their goal. Some of the flaws that they have are gonna be keeping them from getting the exact thing that they so desperately need and want. So I try to build some of that contrast into the character. But I always also want to have an idea of where those traits came from. I wanna have a good view of their backstory and understanding.

what their wounding event was from the past, and what is it that has really impacted them in a way that has changed them so that now at the start of the story they are wounded in some way, they are protecting themselves trying to keep that thing from happening again and those protections are actually hamstringing them and harming them and creating more problems that are keeping them from achieving their goal. And so I think it's super important to

to think carefully about your characters and to look at a lot of different, look at them from a lot of different angles, look at what happened in their past, look at how they are right now and how are they unfulfilled, how are they unsatisfied, so that you can move forward and then see where they need to be at the end and how to get there. And so much of that I think is built into who the character is. It's just...

very helpful to be able to build that in the beginning. I know other people who, you the characters come to them kind of fully formed, like they have a character in mind and they build the story around the character. And I think the same principle applies. You still want those things to be built in. I think people maybe have an easier time of it in that situation because the character is kind of already there and you just have to tweak it a little bit, you know, to make sure that you've got the right elements.

Teddy Smith (10:45)
Yeah, definitely. And when you're doing that sort of what if part of what, what lies in like

how would the character react? Say you're a writer and you're maybe struggling a bit how a character's feelings might be put across in that scene. Do you have any tips about what first steps a writer could take to try and overcome that maybe that small block?

Becca Puglisi (11:06)
When it comes to writing a character's emotion, think it's really important to do some background work in the beginning ⁓ to kind of get a baseline for who your character is. Because like I said, every character is different. So that question about reserved or demonstrative, that's a really big one because it's kind of like the spectrum, you know, when you've got

Teddy Smith (11:12)
Mm-hmm. .

Becca Puglisi (11:25)
Demonstrative on one end, reserved on the other. And where does your character fall? That's gonna give you a really good idea of how big their emotional responses are gonna be. they gonna be big and dramatic? Are they gonna be subdued? Are they gonna be somewhere in the middle? So knowing that is really important. And then you also wanna think about the scene itself. Well, let me go back.

Personality plays a huge part in that too. Somebody who is shy, somebody who is insecure, somebody who is cocky, know, all of those personality traits, they're gonna determine the way that they respond emotionally. So that's kind of like the character as a whole and who they are emotionally. But then you wanna think about the scene too. Is something happening in the scene that is going to change the way they would normally respond?

you know, is there some kind of a trigger? Is there some way that they're feeling vulnerable or insecure? And you can build those things into a scene if you want a bigger response or if you want to create a scenario where they're gonna be uncomfortable, where they might make a mistake, which is then gonna help you, you know, further the plot and move things along. So the scene, things that are happening at the scene level are also important.

and understanding their emotions. Who are they there with? Are there certain people there that they may not be comfortable showing their emotions to or showing certain emotions around? Somebody they want to impress, somebody they have a history with. Thinking about that, you can also build the cast around. If you want certain things to happen, you can make sure that you have certain people who are witnessing the things that are happening and being there with the character that

kind of puts them off and causes them to want to hide or want to be more reserved or to put on a certain emotion and make it look like they're not feeling frustrated or embarrassed or whatever. So you can build those things into your scene, but you have to think about that ahead of time and think about what response you want and then create the scene that you want to get that response.

Teddy Smith (13:27)
Yeah, that's such good advice. I was just thinking about practical reasons or practical ways of using the emotional thesaurus. Like say you're having a character feeling one particular emotion, like say you think they should be angry or something like that. How would you use the emotional thesaurus to maybe build those layers into that character's reaction to what they're doing?

Becca Puglisi (13:52)
Can you, I'm sorry, can you ask that one one more time?

Teddy Smith (13:54)
So I was trying to think of

practical ways of using the emotional thesaurus. Say you're writing and you've got a character that is feeling an emotion, say anger. How would you use the emotional thesaurus to try and build some of those layers that we've just been talking about?

Becca Puglisi (14:12)
I think that it's helpful because it has, there's a whole section on physical cues for that emotion. And that's kind of like what's happening externally. It's what everybody else can see. There's also a section on internal thoughts. it's, you can,

think about the process that's going on mentally. And I think that that's a mistake that a lot of people make with the emotion is that they're just showing what's happening and they're not really fully exploring the whole process. Because there is a process when something happens and an emotion comes on. We have to go through a mental process of processing what is happening. And a lot of times the emotions come

out of that. And so when you can show the characters internal thoughts about it, that is a way to bring realism into the process because that's the way that we go through emotions as people. I think that it's also helpful to think about hidden emotion and how emotion is very often subdued. You we don't want people to know that we're feeling a certain way or we don't want to have a big reaction.

or we don't want people to know what we think about what is going on. And so we keep it on the down low and we're very careful and reserved with our responses. And so there's a section in the emotion thesaurus for each emotion that shows what it looks like when it's suppressed. So that if your character is in that situation, you have some help there to help show, okay, this is what they're.

showing that they're feeling, but this is what they're really feeling. And that's where we use, you know, the outer things that are going on are going to be what they want, what the character wants people to think. But when you can show their thoughts, you can show what they're actually thinking and what they're actually feeling and kind of the real response to what's going on. And that's how we're able to walk

Teddy Smith (15:41)
you

Becca Puglisi (15:59)
that line of.

the characters showing other characters one thing, but revealing certain other things to the reader. And so in that way, I think the emotion of the source is helpful, especially for kind of nailing that nuance, you know, of being able to convey certain things to characters and certain things to readers. It's also helpful. There's a section for each emotion on what does it what could it escalate to and what could it de-escalate to.

because a common problem when you're writing emotion is kind of jumping from one emotion to another without thinking about the natural progression. And so that pulls readers out of the story because they realize, you know, why is she angry? She was just perfectly fine. And all of a sudden she's really mad. You know, there's a progression of emotion. And so we need to be able to understand what that spectrum is for different emotions. And the book can be really helpful for that too.

Teddy Smith (16:52)
Yeah.

You just touched on one there about writers jumping too fast to emotions like suddenly the character is extremely furious and it's come out of nowhere. Are there any other main mistakes that you see writers write when they're choosing different emotions to write about?

Becca Puglisi (17:07)
Yeah, there's too much emotion, obviously. And then you get into melodrama where they're always having a big, huge response. And there are certain characters where, I mean, that is kind of who they are, but most people are not that way. So it's very important ⁓ to avoid melodrama, to again, keep in mind that continuum of emotion and then know who your character is emotionally so that you can write the emotion in a way that your character.

is going to convey things. So there's melodrama and then I think a lot of times there's not the opposite, there's the opposite problem where there's not enough emotion, where we're not, we're just kind of writing a story, we're writing events that are happening and things are happening to the character and they're responding to them, but we don't really know how the character feels and when the reader can't, can't

understand what the character's feeling, they don't know what to feel themselves. And so that's the biggest thing that you want to do when you're conveying a character's emotion is to write it in such a way that readers can pick up on it and connect to it. We want to create a situation where the reader is kind of feeling what the character's feeling like on a

a more subdued level, obviously. But when we are able to show the emotion through physical cues, through the context of their thoughts, through the way that they respond, when we can show the emotion, it makes it a really natural thing for readers because they've been in that situation. They have had those same responses. They're subconsciously able to tell immediately what the character is feeling. And they get like a hint of it themselves because they've been there.

So that's why the whole showing of emotion is so important and that's why it's such a problem when we don't have enough emotion in the story. So that's another problem that I see sometimes in the stories that I look at. ⁓

Teddy Smith (19:05)
How about body language? do you approach making sure that people's actions

and the way that they're moving and the things they do

in line with what they're saying and how you expect the scene to be progressing.

Becca Puglisi (19:17)
I think it's really helpful to, again, to pay attention to other people, to look at real conversations. And again, it's weird, you know? mean, who sits there and watches people talking when they're not in the conversation? And when you're in a conversation yourself, you're not thinking about that, obviously, but that's where I think sometimes movies can be really helpful. But when you just want to be able to watch people and see the interplay between speech

Teddy Smith (19:27)
You you

Becca Puglisi (19:43)
and body language because dialogue is not just about talking. I dialogue

is our words, obviously, but when we're talking, we're doing all kinds of things. mean, we're moving around, we're showing how comfortable we are with the topic or with the other person.

The body language totally plays into that. And so there has to be a balance between the words that are being spoken and the body language that is being shown. that is finding that proper balance is a really good way to be able to get the emotion across in a way that is realistic for the way that people really talk and move.

Teddy Smith (20:19)
Yeah.

Now you've also got a few other books. It's not just the Emotion Thesaurus, but in order to build a rounded character, you've got things like the Conflict Thesaurus and the Emotion Amplifier Thesaurus. Now there's quite a lot of work here to help people to make sure their characters are really well rounded and well thought through. How do you usually recommend people use these books to make sure that their characters are well rounded? Do you usually get into...

use them as they're writing or is it a case of reading them beforehand and then taking the lessons on board?

Becca Puglisi (20:47)
Well, they're really each book is focused on a different aspect of storytelling. And so it's really people can use them however they need to use them with whatever they need help with. have the negative and positive.

Teddy Smith (20:51)
Yep. you

Becca Puglisi (21:00)
There's two different books and those are really helpful for building characters. We talk in there about all these different personality traits that are fairly common. But we look at where they come from, you know, that we're not just pulling character traits out of the air, that the character traits that we give to our cast that they are coming from somewhere.

And then we talk in that book about how to show those character traits. So we're not coming right out and saying, you know, that the character is stubborn or that the character is kind. I mean, you're showing that through their actions and the situations that you put them in. The emotional wound thesaurus is also a huge part, in my opinion, of character building because every character who's going through a change arc in the story,

Teddy Smith (21:28)
you

Becca Puglisi (21:43)
is going to need a wounding event that is at the root of it, that is kind of created who they are today in the story right now on page one. So the emotional wound thesaurus, I recommend for people when they are building their characters. And those three books together are really good for character building. Then we have the

The setting thesaurus books, obviously great for when you want help with your settings and how to show descriptions and do that in a way that's not heavy handed and just all the different things that you can do with a setting. You know, we talk about how you can you can use your descriptions to do lots of different things other than just paint a visual picture. Conflict the conflict thesaurus is we have two of those because there's just so much conflict. ⁓

Teddy Smith (22:26)
Ha ha ha.

Becca Puglisi (22:29)
We,

you know, we use that, encourage people to use that for a couple of different things for plotting, you know, for if you need help coming up with ideas for how to, you know, make things worse for your character, how to complicate their life, how to create situations that are going to dig them deeper into the hole. We have those books for that.

And conflict though is also really good for character arc. know, that your character over the course of the story, they are going to have to grow in a certain way. They're going to have to give up something and make a change in order to be able to achieve their story goal. And the story is all about chances that they have to do that. As they're going along, they're thinking, okay, I've got to, you know, I've got to make this change. Well, you're going to hit them with.

conflict scenarios that create choice opportunities. Am I going to move forward with my plan to make a change or am I going to revert back to what's comfortable, even though it's not really working for me, but it's where I feel comfortable and it's my happy place. you know, those conflict scenarios are really key for both character arc and for plotting. So it really just depends on.

on what you need and where you just need a little bit of help or brainstorming boost. .

Teddy Smith (23:44)
Yeah, that's great. in your work, you do run loads of workshops with

different people about a lot around this.

building the rounded characters and the character development and things like that. What do those workshops look like and what would people get at end of them?

Becca Puglisi (23:58)
Well, we have built lots of different workshops around the content of our books and just things that we have learned in writing the books. And most of those we do, it can be, some of them are three hours, some of them are an hour and a half, just depends on whatever the group needs. And a lot of them have workshop opportunities built into them where, you know, I find, I taught first grade before.

I became a writer and I know that when you're giving a lot of information, it's better for people to apply it right away. They have a much better chance of kind of retaining that information. So we try when we can to build an opportunities during our workshops for them to practice what we're talking about. So if we're, you know, talking about building characters and we're talking about looking at wounding events, we'll take some time for character for the attendees to explore that for their character. And, you know, if we're talking about character building and

different character traits, you we'll have opportunities built in for them to look at those traits and figure out, you know, which ones would work best. But our goal is always for people to come away with information that they didn't have before that they can use to strengthen that area of storytelling, it's whether it's writing high stakes or it's ⁓ using the setting or finding your character's emotional wound, whatever it is.

Teddy Smith (25:12)
Yeah.

Yeah, definitely. so, I mean, you've sold over a million books. So I'm thinking, I have to ask this, if you could give one piece of advice to struggling writers who are wanting to get their characters to be more real and to be more rounded, what would that be?

Becca Puglisi (25:29)
That would be for characters, would say to just look to the real world, like look at the people that are around you and seeing that they're all made up of positive and negative traits and we're all a mixed bag. And so we have to have a mixture of those in our characters for our characters to be authentic.

And those traits, again, they need to come from somewhere. That it's not just things that we're interested in or really cool traits that we wish we had. That they need to have developed because of...

something that happened in the characters past or because of a mentor or you know something that happened that was a good thing that caused them to embrace, you know, generosity or compassion or courage or whatever it is. All of those things come from somewhere and so you have to just do the research and make sure that the character that you're creating is well rounded with a mixture of traits but also that their traits make sense based on the factors from their past.

Teddy Smith (26:30)
I love that advice because you sometimes you read like I quite like reading thriller books and the main characters and those often quite like

single-sided, know, they're just trying to be the hero and solve the problem. And those books I read really quickly, whereas the books I really want to delve into and learn more about are the ones where there's character flaws and there's like positives and negatives to everyone. So I think that's really, really great advice.

Becca Puglisi (26:39)
Nice.

Yeah. Yes, we are working on the Fear of the Sorus, which is gonna be coming out in the spring. And it's basically just an exploration of how fear plays into character arc.

Teddy Smith (26:52)
Now, what book, just last question is, I think you're working on one more book at the moment, A New Thesaurus. Why don't you tell us a bit about that?

Becca Puglisi (27:10)
You know something bad happens in the past and then you basically develop this fear that it's gonna happen again And so that fear starts driving your behavior. It starts Making changes, you know to your personality you might adopt certain traits that are meant to protect you and keep you safe You might adopt certain biases or certain Mindsets about you know certain kinds of people or you know, so many things that come out of a wounding event

but it's really, it's driven by that fear that it's gonna happen again. And so your character enters the story with a certain set of flaws that are being driven by a fear that they have that's rooted in their wounding event. And that fear is gonna have to be dealt with before they're gonna be able to move forward into happiness and wholeness. So it's really just, we've been studying a lot about the psychology of fear.

how it plays into character arc, how you can use it at the main turning points, to again, create those opportunities to either continue moving ahead or to revert to past behaviors. then just how to write fear, how to, it's such a big.

You know, we've got a whole book on emotions and fear is only one of them, but it really is such a huge part of who we are as as human beings. It's it's built into us as a way to keep us alive, basically. And so there's a lot around it and how what's happening in our bodies, you know, when we're feeling afraid.

And fear really should play a part in every story. know, you don't have to obviously be writing a thriller or a horror story for that to be involved, because everybody is afraid at different intensities and different levels. And we should be hitting our characters in ways that do make them feel vulnerable and make them feel threatened. And that's where that fear comes in, even a low grade fear. And so it's all about writing that fear well and just being really clear with it.

and using it as much as to the, using it to the best capability in the story to do the best things in our stories that we can with it.

Teddy Smith (29:15)
Yeah, I love that. I can't wait for that to come out. Now, people want to get in contact with you, where's the best place for them to do that?

Becca Puglisi (29:21)
Yes, our blog is Writers Helping Writers, so it's writershelpingwriters.org. And then we also have a subscription-based service, onestopforwriters.com, where we basically build some tools that are based on the content from our book.

Teddy Smith (29:35)
Brilliant. Well, thank you very much for coming on. It's been fascinating to chat about characters. I can't wait to implement some of this into my book, because I'm writing at the moment. No problem. Speak soon.

Becca Puglisi (29:42)
Awesome, thank you so much for having me. All

right.