The Describer's Dictionary: A Treasury of Terms & Literary Quotations

As one of those writers who built an entire room onto her house to store all the books with scribbles in the margins, post-it notes, bookmarks, and dog-eared books marking my favorite passages, when the time comes to edit my -own- works, it can be very time consuming (and so much more fun than eradicating adverbs) to sit down in the library and reintroduce myself to my old friends, searching for just the right inspiration to spice up that clunky character description or scene. This book collects many of the best of those descriptions into a convenient form, broken into general categories of description, as well as a thesaurus type listing of many less-used descriptive words. It was what I wanted after reading the reviews, and I am very show more happy with this concise collection which will give inspiration without making me forget I need to be editing, and not re-reading Atlas Shrugged. show less

For wordophiles (is that a word?), this is one of those books about words that is just plain fun to read through. For writers struggling to find the right word, it's indispensible. Grambs has divided the book into sections which make finding the type of word you're looking for pretty easy. Searching for a word to describe someone with a blank face: go to "People/Faces/having a vacant face" and find "blank, unreadable, deadpan, inscrutable, mask-like, expressionless, impassive, empty, poker-faced."

I also like the way Grambs uses literary quotations on the page opposite the words to show writers at work.

I haven't read the whole book, but I am using it as reference. It is a very good basic reference book for writing descriptions, but some sections like, for example, the eye section, could be longer.

This is a nice category of words from which to choose character-building details.