Category: Show, don’t tell

How to write with body language

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55% of human communication is nonverbal.

Which means more than half of what you say is nothing but expressions and gestures and eye contact.

Which means if you use nothing but “he said” and “she replied” to tag dialogue, your readers are missing half the message. Besides which, body language is also an effective way to show tone without “telling” tone. For instance:

“Hmmm,” she said unhappily/happily/thoughtfully. [All “telling”]

“Hmmm,” she frowned.

“Hmmm,” she smiled.

“Hmmm,” she tapped her lips with one finger.

We have the additional benefit of cutting the dialogue tag, “said,” which can get annoying in large doses.

Of course, use of body language isn’t limited to dialogue. You can say a lot without actually saying anything (useful if, like me, you are terrible at writing dialogue):

He hunched in his chair, elbows on knees, head in hands.

She bit the corner of her bottom lip, her gaze darting left and right.

He frowned, stroking his chin.

She leaned back and folded her arms, tapping her fingers against her skin.

He cocked one eyebrow, smirking.

There are countless other gestures to illustrate countless other emotions. Here are a few (in totally random order). Got any other good ones? Leave ‘em in the comments!

Grin

Smirk

Grimace

Furrow brow

Wrinkle forehead

Slap forehead

Twiddle thumbs

Twitch/tick

Bite nail

Suck thumb

Pick nose

Run hand through hair

Twirl hair

Skip

Amble

Stroll

Lumber

Swagger

Shuffle

Bob head

Flare nostrils

Wink

Nod

Shake head

Hug self/knees

Rub arms

Shudder

Shiver

Tremble

Scratch

Rub eye

Slouch

Tilt head to one side

Meet gaze

Look in the eye

Gaze slide to floor

Blink

Start

Shrug

Sigh

Sniff

Swallow

Wrinkle nose

Squint

Shift weight

Cross legs

Eyes glitter

Eyes glint

Clap

Snap fingers

Thread fingers

Fold hands

Nose in air

Look down nose

Look sideways

Peer

Glance

Stare

Glare

Purse lips

Push hair out of eyes

Backpacks across the galaxy: how to personalize the epic

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Epic-ness is all well and good, but without a personal touch, it can fall flat. We wouldn’t care whether or not Middle Earth fell to Sauron if we didn’t get to know Frodo and Sam along the way. It’s the little, everyday details that make us care; that show us the relevance of the big picture by connecting it to a close-up of the character(s).

This concept really threw me the first time I read Out of the Silent Planet. A man is on a walking tour in England, when he loses his backpack and is kidnapped by two men who take him to an alien planet. He escapes, and spends the next several chapters living among the locals, learning their language and discovering fascinating things about the universe. Then, on page 96, he gets a chance to look through a telescope at a planet the locals call Thulcandra:

He wondered for a moment if it was Mars he was looking at; then, as his eyes took in the markings better, he recognized what they were—Northern Europe and a piece of North America. They were upside down with the North Pole at the bottom of the picture and this somehow shocked him. But it was Earth he was seeing—even, perhaps, England, though the picture shook a little and his eyes were quickly getting tired, and he could not be certain that he was not imagining it. It was all there in that little disk—London, Athens, Jerusalem, Shakespeare. There everyone had lived and everything had happened; and there, presumably, his pack was still lying in the porch of an empty house near Sterk.

This last sentence is so amazing it makes me dizzy. From the alienness of another planet, the hugeness of the universe, the awe of seeing Earth from space, the vastness of human history—to the ordinariness of a backpack left on a porch. This is why C.S. Lewis is my favorite writer; he turns my brain inside out.

Douglas Adams does something similar (but much more humorous) in his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, when Arthur Dent is falling to his death and suddenly remembers he has a bottle of olive oil in his knapsack—possibly the last piece of the Earth left in the entire universe (this realization enabled him to learn how to fly…but that’s another post).

And I experienced something similar when I was driving home from visiting my grandparents last Christmas. We stopped at a Denny’s, and I happened to notice that the walls at this Denny’s had the exact same texture as the walls at home. And although I hadn’t been gone long enough to miss home, I suddenly got a lump in my stomach and felt homesick.

Moral of the post: the details make it meaningful. The next time you are writing a “big picture” scene, consider making your character notice or remember something that gives you a “close up.”

Plot Exposition, Muppets, and Cannibalism: a Writing Lesson from the Movies

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There’s a scene in the Great Muppet Caper, in which Lady Holiday explains to Miss Piggy the backstory for the entire movie.
Miss Piggy: Why are you telling me all this?
Lady Holiday: It’s plot exposition. It has to go somewhere.

The Muppets are a classic in my family, and whenever we catch serious movies forcing blocks of plot exposition into dialogue for convenience, we roll our eyes at each other and quote Lady Holiday.

It’s a good rule of thumb to make sure you Show Don’t Tell by giving everything you write the “how can I translate this to the big screen?” test, but shoving all your plot into dialogue and all your character development into voiceover is cheating – and it will show in your work. Perhaps a better way to remember the rule is “Imply, don’t state.” Let’s switch to an example of Imply Don’t State done right in a movie.

The Book of Eli opens up in a forest, gray with fog, where lies a decaying human body. A skin-and-bones cat is picking at the carcass. A few feet away, a hunter waits, aiming a crossbow. He sees the perfect moment, shoots the cat, picks up the dead creature for his next meal, and leaves the human body.

This seemingly simple first scene conveys everything we need to know in one fell swoop. Something terrible has happened in this world. Times are desperate. And even though we don’t yet know the main character’s name, or where he comes from, or where he is going, we know he won’t eat human flesh, even if he is starving. He also doesn’t bury the body, but thanks to the previous fact, we know this is not due to a lack of respect for human life. Either he’s seen too many human bodies to bother burying one of them, or he has more important things to do. Or both. We also know that he has patience and skill with a weapon.

We learn all this in less than five minutes, without hearing a word of dialogue. And it’s brilliant. Approach your novel (or short story) the same way.