The best resources to develop sense-ational storytelling skills

List by Annette Simmons

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Why am I passionate about this?

When your storytelling simulates imagined physiological experiences, it guides your listeners to vicariously see, hear, smell, taste, and touch the world of your story. While my books suggest six kinds of stories and four buckets to find stories, I also use these favorite resources for training my brain to think in sensory language. Dip in to find a steady supply of metaphors, images, mannerisms, and context builders that make your story come alive. Current strategies that maximize clicks rarely tap into the wealth of sensory language needed to build epic, long-lasting results.

The books I picked & why

The Emotion Thesaurus

By Angela Ackerman , Becca Puglisi ,

Why I love this book

Yes, it says for writers, but this book is a great resource for in-person storytelling. On these pages are thousands of ideas on how you can show, not tell.

Comb through ideas on how to express a character’s emotion with posture, tone, and mannerisms. Don’t just say, “he looked guilty.” Look up “guilt” and find ways to indicate guilt without telling people what to think. Have your guilty character “avert her eyes,” “shift her feet,” “pull at her collar,” or “suddenly lose her appetite.” I regularly flick through this book to train my imagination on the sensory cues that make a story come alive.

The Emotion Thesaurus

By Angela Ackerman , Becca Puglisi ,

Why should I read it?

6 authors picked The Emotion Thesaurus as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The bestselling Emotion Thesaurus, often hailed as “the gold standard for writers” and credited with transforming how writers craft emotion, has now been expanded to include 55 new entries!

One of the biggest struggles for writers is how to convey emotion to readers in a unique and compelling way. When showing our characters’ feelings, we often use the first idea that comes to mind, and they end up smiling, nodding, and frowning too much.

If you need inspiration for creating characters’ emotional responses that are personalized and evocative, this ultimate show-don’t-tell guide for emotion can help. It includes:

Body language…

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Philosophy In The Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought

By George Lakoff , Mark Johnson ,

Why I love this book

Before Lakoff wrote about politics, he compiled this treasure trove of the metaphors humans recruit to grapple with moral concerns. For instance, early in the book I learned how to take a listener “in front” of a problem, “behind it” “inside it” as well as “outside it” so they might vicariously experience four points of view instead of one.

Engaging the body embeds regular intelligence with sensory wisdom.

Philosophy In The Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought

By George Lakoff , Mark Johnson ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Philosophy In The Flesh as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

What are human beings like? How is knowledge possible? What is truth? Where do moral values come from? Questions like these have stood at the centre of Western philosophy for centuries. In addressing them, philosophers have made certain fundamental assumptions,that we can know our own minds by introspection, that most of our thinking about the world is literal, and that reason is disembodied and universal,that are now called into question by well-established results of cognitive science. It has been shown empirically that:Most thought is unconscious. We have no direct conscious access to the mechanisms of thought and language. Our ideas…

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History

The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

By Ernest Kurtz , Katherine Ketcham ,

Why I love this book

I love this pre-social-media collection of moral quandaries and relationship-based solutions presented in story form. Much of it is about addiction to substances, but it applies to all kinds of addictions, undermining our ability to deal with dangerous subjects.

I’ve told stories from these pages, and most of my ideas come from reading stories that inevitably remind me of a perfect story from my own life. Stories about release, gratitude, humility, tolerance, and forgiveness offer antidotes to the kind of problems that linear mechanical reasoning can’t solve.

For me, investing in a constant stream of moral stories supports the vital behavioral norms we need as groundwork for developing trusting relationships.

The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

By Ernest Kurtz , Katherine Ketcham ,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Spirituality of Imperfection as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

I Am Not Perfect is a simple statement of profound truth, the first step toward understanding the human condition, for to deny your essential imperfection is to deny yourself and your own humanity. The spirituality of imperfection, steeped in the rich traditions of the Hebrew prophets and Greek thinkers, Buddhist sages and Christian disciples, is a message as timeless as it is timely. This insightful work draws on the wisdom stories of the ages to provide an extraordinary wellspring of hope and inspiration to anyone thirsting for spiritual growth and guidance in these troubled times.

Who are we? Why so…

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Self-help

Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History

By William Safire ,

Why I love this book

Reading about posture, tone, and timing does not train your body to know when and where to shift. What I do is stimulate my creative muscles by reading aloud any of the two hundred speeches as I imagine standing in the shoes of the orator who delivered it. It’s like an adventure in time travel.

The first time is usually a mechanical recitation but once you figure out the context, and what is meaningful to you, personally, you will experience a powerful difference in delivery. Experiment with posture changes, tone varies, pauses, and pacing to make the words more memorable. Expand your repertoire of posture, tone, and timing options by standing in the shoes of the greats.

Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History

By William Safire ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Lend Me Your Ears as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

From a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, this collection of speeches is “the most valuable kind of book, the kind that benefits mind and heart” (Peggy Noonan). This third edition of the bestselling collection of classic and modern oratory offers numerous examples of the greatest speeches ever delivered—from the ancient world to the modern. Speeches in Lend Me Your Ears span a broad stretch of history, from Gen. George Patton inspiring Allied troops on the eve of D-Day to Pericles’s impassioned eulogy for fallen Greek soldiers during the Peloponnesian War; and from Jesus of Nazareth’s greatest sermons to Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s fiery…

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The New Beacon Book of Quotations by Women

By Rosalie Maggio (editor) ,

Why I love this book

If you are working on a story that feels boring, dive into this book of quotations (or any book of quotations, really) to prompt ideas on delivery. The process of jumping in and out of a wide variety of points of view invigorates my creativity.

I look up themes from my story and see what I can find that will make it more memorable: a turn of phrase, an example of brevity, or one more ingenious way to challenge conventional wisdom. It’s like a thesaurus but better.

The New Beacon Book of Quotations by Women

By Rosalie Maggio (editor) ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The New Beacon Book of Quotations by Women as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Here are 16,000 quotes from 2,600 women—most of them found in no other collection. With dynamic and witty words by sources ranging from Bella Abzug to Ann Zwinger on over 1,400 topics, this is an indispensable reference and browser's delight.

"An important counterpoint to general collections of quotations, which, unfortunately, still don't offer equitable coverage of women's words."
-Carolyn Mulac, Library Journal

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