INTERIORITY

What’s up, fellow word nerds? We’ve got a hefty one today, but I’m continuing to beat a singular drum: just like spoken dialogue and interiority, the purpose of body language is to show more than just what characters do (or say, or think). The purpose of body language is to show us who characters are.

Said another way, body language most effective when it exists in the context of the larger story and the characters in it.

Lemme show you how to do it.

WHAT BODY LANGUAGE IS (AND WHY IT’S DIALOGUE)

Body language, |ˈbädē ˌlaNGɡwij|, noun: how characters move their bodies in a scene, consciously or unconsciously, that reveals or conceals information about who they are, what they’re thinking, and/or what they’re feeling.

And yes—in my editorial opinion, it’s part of dialogue. Not just because it’s great on a technical level for enhancing dialogue, but because how characters move or don’t move communicates information to the people around them (including the reader). Often, those people respond to body language instead of dialogue. Consider:

• A character says “I’m ready,” but their shoulders are hunched and they’re trembly all over. However the people around them choose to act, most of those people would at least wonder if that character really meant it when they said “I’m ready.”
• A character claims he’s a hard-working farmer from the countryside, but he moves with an upright, regal bearing, and continuously reaches for a pocket watch that isn’t there—revealing hands with a distinct lack of calluses.
• The antagonist tries to goad the protagonist into a fistfight, but the protagonist keeps their cool and absorbs the insults as the antagonist loses steam.

Each of those body language choices reveals information about those characters: their background, their lives, their experience. Ignoring the opportunity to use specificity of movement takes away from our understanding of those characters.

CLICHÉS AS THE ENEMY OF CONTEXT

In January, I discussed that when dialogue is as simple as, “Leave me be” or “Warn me next time,” it might be plausible for any character to say—which makes it uninteresting. Why? Because we as readers don’t learn anything specific about those characters. Yeah, we might learn about a simple characteristic of theirs, like defensiveness or being flabbergasted, but it says nothing about their personality, which makes the dialogue feel flat and lifeless.

Body language can fall into similar traps. When characters simply float through a scene with neutral or clichéd movements (or no described movement at all), it makes them feel bland, because we as a reader aren’t picturing anything we haven’t heard a hundred times before with a hundred other characters. Have some examples of that bland body language:

• Sweating palms
• Pounding hearts
• Gulping
• Nodding
• Sighing
• Eyes narrowing
• Looking down at one’s hands

We’ve all written them. Hell, I still use them, though I try to do it sparingly. Body language clichés make for the occasional useful shorthand, but more often, they simply reinforce what we’ve already been told in dialogue or prose. That repetitiveness can be frustrating to a reader. Take this line:

“Don’t touch me,” he snapped, his eyes narrowing.

When the author uses a dialogue tag like snapped, or powerful language like “Don’t touch me,” the reader can already infer loads of information about that character’s body language. Adding that simple body language that anyone can do serves only to repeat what we already know or assume. It also assumes your reader needs their metaphorical hand held to understand characters’ emotions, which is always a big nope.

“Don’t touch me,” he snapped.

There it is without the body language. It’s much more powerful, least of all because now the tag is as snappy as his words. It doesn’t drag on. It stays punchy. (Many would argue you don’t even need the “he snapped,” considering the strength of the dialogue. For this editor, it depends on context within the piece.)

But the biggest problem with clichés like narrowing eyes is that they have no unique oomph, nothing to indicate how this particular character would react to this particular situation. It doesn’t show their personality. It isn’t specific to them; it doesn’t distinguish them from any other character who could do any of those actions at any given point. And as I’ve harped on, oh, a gazillion times by now, distinguishing dialogue is what makes characters really stick.

HOW TO PERSONALIZE BODY LANGUAGE (AND AVOID THOSE CLICHÉS)

Like spoken dialogue and interiority, writing excellent body language requires you, the writer, to know who your characters really are, and how their personalities and backgrounds make them react in each situation. If you have answers to the character interview questions here, it should be easy-peasy to interview your characters in a similar way to discover how to personalize their body language. Just ask ‘em:

• How does their background and/or trauma influence the way they physically hold themselves in everyday life (literally, their posture and key mannerisms)?
  • Were they a soldier whose spine is straight as a bayonet?
  • An orphan raised on the streets to not trust anyone or anything, who now avoids eye contact—or perhaps holds eye contact and speaks confidently to win people’s trust, all while refusing to trust them himself?
  • Are they blind in their left eye, so they prefer to sit with their left side to the wall, ensuring they don’t miss anything?
• What everyday things do they do or notice because of their upbringing, background, and/or trauma?
  • Did they once narrowly escape a huge fire, so now they avoid the route to work where they can see industrial smokestacks spewing flame, and their colleague lighting up a cigarette makes them flinch?
  • Is the outside of their hand always smudged with ink from their constant note-taking, so they’re always brushing at their clothes where the ink stains them?
  • Do they work in horticulture, so they notice exactly which flowers fill the planter boxes outside the house they’re breaking into?
• How does their background and their values affect the way they react to moments of stress or intensity?
  • A homicide detective may not balk at a crime scene, but a passerby without any experience in blood or criminal cases might trip backwards, become nauseated, scream, or all three.
  • A lifelong diplomat would be a pro at easing tensions in a room, but an out-of-practice spy might sweat the same thing whether or not they have the ability to do it.
  • A character might project confidence even if they don’t feel it, all to make their younger charge feel confident, too.
  • An honest person might pull off a flawless lie to save a friend.
• Do they have a small physical movement they default to when they’re doing low-stakes plot business like thinking, working, driving, or studying their Pepe-Silvia-esque bulletin board of newsclippings and red thread?
  • Twirling a pencil
  • Clicking their pocket watch open and closed
  • Touching the stone in the pommel of their sword at their hip
  • Tugging the strings of their hoodie
  • Polishing their glasses
  • Rubbing their forehead

Answering questions like these will show you exactly how your individual characters react, instigate, or simply exist in their bodies, all because of how they were raised and what they’ve experienced.

But there’s another kind of body language, and I like to call that business.

GIVE CHARACTERS BUSINESS

Business is how characters physically interact with the environment around them, often paired with dialogue. This isn’t just biting their thumbnail or adjusting their necktie, since those are things they do to themselves or on themselves. Business is when characters use their sense of touch to manipulate and interact with the scenery, and like body language, it too tells us about the characters.

When I’m teaching in front of real live humans, I like to compare a lack of business to that scene in The Matrix where Neo and Morpheus meet in a blank void. Until the furniture shows up, there’s nothing at all to interact with, nothing to touch or handle or use. To me, scenes without business feel exactly like that, as if characters are floating in a blank void instead of existing against the rich backdrops the author no doubt pictured while they wrote. Business connects characters with those backdrops, and in doing so, connects the reader with those backdrops, making the environments feel much more alive and immersive.

Pair business with body language, and you’ve got a strong sense of place that enhances the characters and the dialogue.

That’s a lot to absorb all at once, but it’s simple in practice. Take these examples of some business characters can engage with that also show their body language:

• Pushing mashed potatoes around a plate
• Bustling about making tea
• Continuing to practice their swordplay despite a friend’s interruption
• Scrolling on their phone (how does it change the scrolling when the scroller is a teen facing off against angry parents, or an isekaied protagonist who’s desperate to find a few bars of reception?)
• Feeling the texture of the expensive sofa they sit on
• Dabbing on their most expensive perfume
• Grabbing champagne off a passing tray
• Stabbing out a cigarette (the force with which they do this—and where they do this—can say loads without the character having to say anything at all)

It’s simple to add, yet many manuscripts I edit have no such business at all, leaving me stuck in the void with Neo and Morpheus. (Granted, there are worse places to be.) So if you’re stuck on how to incorporate all of this in an actual manuscript instead of a bulleted list, let’s go over an example. This one’s from Amberlough again, because oooh, this book is full of gems. I’ve bolded the business and italicized the body language for easy reference, and yes, sometimes they’re one and the same:

“…Say, you got any straights?”

“Liquor cabinet,” he said. “In the office.” A loose wave of his hand indicated the direction.

[…]

She put a handful of cigarettes in the pocket of the dressing gown, and one between her lips. […] Once she’d lit the straight and drawn a breath, she said, “So, you work. Doing what?”

There was a long silence. She went to the doorway and leaned against the frame, watching him. She took another drag on her cigarette. The orange spark flared with her breath.

“Put another record on,” he said.

“What’s your pleasure?”

He shrugged, and adjusted his blanket. Kneeling behind the sofa, she started to shuffle through the collection stacked beneath the gramophone. He spoke while she was still sorting, so she couldn’t see his face.

“Let’s just say it’s the kind of thing I can’t tell you much about,” he said. “Unless you like the idea of a quick bullet with your head in a bag.”

She was proud she only fumbled with the records, instead of dropping them. Even prouder when she kept her voice steady. “Sounds a treat.”

See what I mean, about business making the scene feel more rich, more alive? I didn’t even share the part before this scene, where the radiator in the room goes out, and the two characters here bundle up against the chill. They both have business with their environments in that way, and again throughout the passage:

• Cordelia, our POV character, asked for a single cigarette, and instead of taking just the one, she secrets a bunch into her pocket, immediately giving us information about who she really is: a bit of a thief.
• Cyril, the other person in the scene, is clearly despondent. His loose hand wave, his silence, his need for noise in the room no matter what it is, his blunt language. His body language, dialogue, and business (or lack thereof) tell us exactly what’s going on with his mood.
• Look at all of the business Cordelia has in this scene: pilfering cigarettes, smoking, shuffling through Cyril’s records. It makes the environment feel real, immersive, because of all her points of contact with it. No blank void here!
• Her body language when she nearly drops the record is fabulously done. It’s mixed with a bit of interiority (note her pride), but again, it tells us who she really is: someone who fears the kind of work Cyril does, but not so much that she can’t handle herself. And not so much that she flees the apartment, either. She continues the scene and even responds with a bit of sass. Her curiosity is stronger than her fear, and that’s information worth knowing about a character.

So heed my advice: give your characters business.

…BUT NOT TOO MUCH BUSINESS

Too much action and body language will put too much space between lines of dialogue, which can give the scene a stilted feeling, one of stopping and starting. It might take pages just to convey a few lines, dragging the pacing to a screeching halt.

In their book Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, authors Renni Browne and Dave King refer to any action, motion, or body language that enhances the dialogue as “beats.” They say,

As with other forms of description, you want to give your readers enough detail to jump-start their imaginations and enough leeway for their imaginations to work. […] Like a piece of good music, good dialogue has an ebb and flow to it. Where you want the tension high…pare the beats down to a bare minimum. If you’ve just had two high-tension scenes in a row, let your readers relax a bit in the next one with some quiet conversation interspersed with pauses (signified by beats).

And they, like many experts, recommend an almost foolproof failsafe to deciding whether that combination of beats and dialogue works: reading your work aloud.

A FEW TECHNICAL WATCH-OUTS

Now that we’ve got a better understanding of how to craft body language that works, let’s go over a few things I see often in the manuscripts I edit (including my own!):

• In first person or close third, no one can see themselves blush. Reading “I blushed” takes me right out of the narrative, because no one can see themselves blush. Something like “his face filled with heat” or another character calling out the blush works much better. (Plus, depending on your character’s skin tone, a blush may not even be that visible.)
• Watch out for nods, smiles, and grins. This seems to be the default reaction for characters trading dialogue in many of the works I edit (and my stuff, too, I admit). Occasional use is fine, but I often find multiple nods, smiles, and grins on the same page. Find a more interesting or simply more varied way to convey agreement, like dialogue on its own.
• Hand check! Everybody take a second and see whether your characters are relying on gripping shoulders, touching hands, or sliding arms around waists. If your main character is in a relationship or situation with another where casual touch is common, then hey neat, let’s see those holy palmers kiss. But just reaching out and touching somebody to punctuate dialogue can be invasive, exaggerated, and startling in real life, especially when there’s a power imbalance or privilege imbalance. People don’t usually touch other people without their permission (or they shouldn’t, anyway). Maybe you have a character who’s naturally a touchy person, but if so, someone else needs to notice.

AND FINALLY

Like spoken dialogue and interiority, don’t sweat this stuff during the draft unless you’re into that sort of thing. Plenty of authors do their edits in rounds at a time, focusing only on single elements like body language in one round, dialogue in another. Like going back to the buffet line for a dessert when you’re ready, rather than crowding the cheesecake on your plate with the mains, individual passes for individual elements is a great way to make sure everything works on its own.

NEXT TIME

Wasn’t it New Year’s Eve five minutes ago? Ah, how time flies when we’re forced to work even as fascism rises like high tide around us. Reminder that I’ve been compiling ways to help here. I’ll see you in July (what the hell), when we’ll talk about creating believable chemistry between characters.

Toodaloo!

—Katherine