Facial Expressions & Body Language??

atombaby said:

Spot on, JAR.

Not to reiterate many posters here, but I'm firmly of the belief that less is more. Not bare bones like a script, but just enough to show the essential emotion to the reader. Let the reader's imagination work for them. As the writer, you're their guide. But don't take them by the hand and dictate each and every movement in the story.

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Exactly. I think that an excessive reliance on facial expressions is often a symptom of the author's desire to make the reader see the scene EXACTLY the way they do, down to the very minute details of the image in their head. But no reader will ever see that image, and nor should you try to force them to. Give them enough info to create their own mental picture, but allow them to embroider some of the less important details.

Devil Ledbetter said:

When facial expressions and minor gestures (chills, shrugs, shifting feet) are overdone a book can read like a boring game of charades. I blame the advice "show don't tell" for tricking writers into thinking they can never say what a character is feeling, they must "show" it with yet another rolled pair of eyeballs, smirk, grimace or slight tilt of the head.

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This is the other most common root cause. Some writers are afraid of telling, because they've been told that explaining is bad. Instead you must insinuate and suggest and illustrate every. little. thing. But sometimes it's alright to just flat out state something in bold. So instead of:

Colonel Malmesbury's face turned redder than a British cavalry officer's coat, as his iron brows met in a deep scowl, like two geriatric caterpillars mating in the middle of his forehead.

You could just say:

Colonel Malmesbury was royally fucked off.

It really depends on context

Kallithrix said:

Colonel Malmesbury's face turned redder than a British cavalry officer's coat, as his iron brows met in a deep scowl, like two geriatric caterpillars mating in the middle of his forehead.

You could just say:

Colonel Malmesbury was royally fucked off.

It really depends on context

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True, but if you're not going to use the geriatric caterpillar image in one of your stories, I call dibs.

Kallithrix said:

Exactly. I think that an excessive reliance on facial expressions is often a symptom of the author's desire to make the reader see the scene EXACTLY the way they do, down to the very minute details of the image in their head. But no reader will ever see that image, and nor should you try to force them to. Give them enough info to create their own mental picture, but allow them to embroider some of the less important details.



This is the other most common root cause. Some writers are afraid of telling, because they've been told that explaining is bad. Instead you must insinuate and suggest and illustrate every. little. thing. But sometimes it's alright to just flat out state something in bold. So instead of:

Colonel Malmesbury's face turned redder than a British cavalry officer's coat, as his iron brows met in a deep scowl, like two geriatric caterpillars mating in the middle of his forehead.

You could just say:

Colonel Malmesbury was royally fucked off.

It really depends on context

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I'd go for a balance between the two. "Colonel Malmesbury was so royally fucked off his face turned the colour of a pickled beetroot."

going back to the OP: It's very important that descriptions of expressions, body language and emotion matches the voice of your narrator. I've been having a lot of trouble with this, and then I realised that it's because my narrator (first person) just wouldn't say it like that. So I asked myself how my character would describe other people's facial expressions and his own feelings, and even whether he'd describe them in a given context, and I'm writing it that way and it works much better. It's not perfect yet. I have quite a bit of figuring out to do for some scenes. But it works way better than trying to describe stuff that he just wouldn't be describing at all just because of some arbitrary advice to show how characters are feeling or whatever. Anything else sticks out like a sore thumb and reads like a cringeworthy cliche. Trying to fix it by writing it better doesn't fix it, because you just end up with a more poetic cringeworthy cliche that still sticks out like a sore thumb.

That's why removing it often works better. And if you do keep it, it has to be consistent with the narrative voice.

Also, if you write a scene well and you write characters that are easy to empathise with, you evoke the emotion in the reader that character would be feeling and the reader will project that onto the character (unless the reader's a sociopath and has no empathy whatsoever) so you don't necessarily need to describe that emotion. If a scene is emotionless that's supposed to be emotional, then maybe you need to work on the scene, not add in a description of the character's feelings or facial expressions or whatever. Showing how characters react to emotions is also very effective. If someone's tearing round smashing stuff up in response to some bad news then it's pretty obvious that they're angry.