Dahlia Evans is the author of a series of thesaurus-style sourcebooks for fiction writers, compiled from words and phrases drawn from hundreds of published novels. Her books are designed as practical reference shelves: organized by what a writer is trying to do at the sentence level, with synonyms and example phrasings grouped under specific descriptive tasks.
Her best-known volume is Thinking Like A Romance Writer: The Sensual Writer's Sourcebook of Words and Phrases (2013), a romance writing thesaurus organized around sensory and emotional description for intimate scenes. The Dialogue Thesaurus: A Fiction Writer's Sourcebook of Dialogue Tags and Phrases works the same way for spoken language, offering alternatives to "said" organized by emotion, body language, and tonal quality.
Character Expressions: A Fiction Writer's Thesaurus of Facial Expressions catalogues the small physical signals novelists use to show emotion on the page, and The Body Thesaurus: A Fiction Writer's Sourcebook of Words and Phrases to Describe collects vocabulary for physical appearance, posture, and movement. The books are widely used by indie novelists working at speed and looking for variation in description without slipping into cliche.
