The Urban Setting Thesaurus: A Writer's Guide to City Spaces

Becca Puglisi · Angela Ackerman

Jun 2016 · JADD Publishing

About this ebook

Making readers care and feel like they’re part of the story should be the number one goal of all writers. Ironically, many storytellers fail to maximize one of fiction’s most powerful elements to achieve this: the setting. Rather than being a simple backdrop against which events unfold, every location has the potential to become a conduit for conveying emotion, characterizing the cast, providing opportunities for deep point of view, and revealing significant backstory. 

Inside this volume, you will find: 

• A list of the sights, smells, tastes, textures, and sounds for over 120 urban settings

• Possible sources of conflict for each location to help you brainstorm ways to naturally complicate matters for your characters

• Advice on how to make every piece of description count so you can maintain the right pace and keep readers engaged

• Tips on utilizing the five senses to encourage readers to more fully experience each moment by triggering their own emotional memories

• Information on how to use the setting to characterize a story’s cast through personalization and emotional values while using emotional triggers to steer their decisions 

• A review of specific challenges that arise when choosing an urban location, along with common descriptive pitfalls that should be avoided

The Urban Setting Thesaurus helps you tailor each setting to your characters while creating a realistic, textured world your readers will long to return to, even after the book closes. 

About the author

Becca Puglisi

As an author, Becca loves nothing more than coming up with new content for her Writers Helping Writers® descriptive thesaurus collection (including the best-selling Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Expression, now an expanded Second Edition), which has sold over half a million copies. She also is co-founder of One Stop For Writers®, a unique online resource containing many helpful tools, craft tutorials, and the entire hyperlinked and searchable thesaurus collection to help writers elevate their storytelling. Becca is an international speaker who enjoys teaching workshops and presenting various writerly topics. Her books are represented by foreign rights agent Marleen Seegers of 2 Seas Agency.

Angela Ackerman

The author of numerous bestselling resource books printed in 8 different languages, Angela enjoys sharing her passion for writing craft. She is a writing coach, international speaker, and a firm believer that writers succeed best together. The desire to help writers in new, innovative ways led to One Stop for Writers®, a unique site originally co-founded with Becca Puglisi and Lee Powell (the creator of Scrivener for Windows and Linux). This creative portal contains game-changing tools and resources that enable writers to craft powerful fiction.