Every single one of these mistakes I've made and then some.
A first-round beta reader of my MS pegged my MC as a stumbling, crying mess.
When I went back and read, I realized oh gods, she was right! He was a disaster! But what to do about it? How to change it?
I looked at the dialogue tags. I had never considered how my MC's reactions helped paint his character. Would a 14-year-old cry after witnessing a dragon kill a peer? Probably.
But did I want to portray him as a crying, blubbering mess elsewhere? Uh, no.
I did some exceptionally hard work, rewriting and coming up with tags that were emotion and character-specific. How? First I used this Emotion Wheel to hep identify some of the primary and secondary emotions he was feeling during certain scenes. Then I thought of the physical actions that conveyed those emotions.
I read about Plutchik's Eight Primary Emotions and how to apply them to writing. Then I wrote them and tried them out on my alpha reader. He ixnayed a few, laughed outright at others, but we refined them and I compiled them into a big long list that I could reference when revising.
Then, I joined a few FB writing groups and they were all atwitter about this resource:
The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer's Guide to Character Expression (Second Edition), by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi.I'm not saying the hard work I did was for nothing. I feel good about that story and confident that my MC is now a strong protagonist, although not a hero. But I also realize many of my dialogue tags are now emotion and character-specific, and may not convey the same meaning with another character.
So yes, I darn well bought The Emotion Thesaurus for my next MS, which I'm plotting. And all the companion volumes, as well.
