Floating body parts

If by wrong, you mean the descriptions are poor writing, then I'd say yes. Obviously that's just my view, but they sound like a writer trying too hard.

LOL--I love floating body parts!

(when they're in a good horror story)

"She rolled her eyes at him."

Oh ho ho ho. Roll 'em back then. She needs them.

Doesn't bother me to see that, except for "Mouth twisted into a frown", which would be okay if it was "Mouths twisted into frowns".
JMO.

No it wouldn't. Mouths can't frown, either in single or plural.

Foreheads frown.

'His mouth twisted into a grimace' would work

It doesn't bother me so much, the rolling eyes etc, I have to say, probably because that's how people talk, so I'm used to it.

My favorite, cited by a famous writer whose name at present escapes me, was in reference to another famous writer who actually produced: "His eyes slid down her dress."

caw

blacbird said:

My favorite, cited by a famous writer whose name at present escapes me, was in reference to another famous writer who actually produced: "His eyes slid down her dress."

caw

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Yeah, I've seen that happen once. Pretty gruesome.

scarletpeaches said:

"She rolled her eyes at him."

Oh ho ho ho. Roll 'em back then. She needs them.

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Sounds like a dice game out of Pirates of the Carribbean.

How about his/her/my eyebrows pulled together.* It makes me wonder what it was the eyebrows were hauling.





*Eyebrows pull together about 357 times in the Twilight series. Another one that bugged me was "rearranged his features." What is he, Mr. Potatohead?

I don't mind them twisting (into things that they can twist into) or something purely descriptive of what they really look like. Otherwise, yes.

Except "rolling eyes" as a verb, so to speak. If somebody does that (a teenager?), is there another active phrasing? I've never had to write it, thank God.

You can roll your eyes. Just don't roll them at something.

rofl
I call them "Active Smilies" and "Active Body Parts" in honor of Microsoft stupidities.

unicornjam said:

"Eyes looked around the crowded room."

I've seen sentences like this in (keyword: unpublished) pieces so many times it's got me wondering if it's an OK practice. It reads like bad writing to me. For one, it drives me insane that there's no possessive pronoun (I don't care if I already know whose body part it belongs to -- write "his" or "her"!) and even if there were, why not just write "He looked around the crowded room"? I can ~infer~ that he's using his eyes.

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Her eyes flew across the room and landed on the drapes.

There. Is that better? (At least they had a soft landing!)

Devil Ledbetter said:

*Eyebrows pull together about 357 times in the Twilight series. Another one that bugged me was "rearranged his features." What is he, Mr. Potatohead?

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Only in Russet Noon.

It's all in the execution (pun intended).

I don't mind "fingers brushing through the hair" or "lips twisted into a smile." But "rolling his eyes toward the door" is plain silly.

I see somebody tossing eyes like dice.

I would rather read that someone's eyebrows "pulled together" than that they "drew closer together due to the action of tensing muscles". But not too often, please. lol

What gets me is the way smiles wander around faces, playing with lips, pulling and tugging at them, and generally indulging in attention-getting behavior.

What gets me is it's pretty much only writers who get their knickers in a twist about it -- most readers couldn't give a stuff as long as the meaning is clear and it's not so obscure a term as to make them go 'huh?'. Phrases such as 'I could feel his eyes undressing me' ( really, eyes have hands?) are pretty common after all in actual real life and no one has a turn about it

Not an excuse to lob eyeballs around, but also a reason not to sweat it too much if the occasional one goes wandering. Because even though we laugh, we know what the writer meant by that phrase, no?

I think repeating a given turn of phrase too often is more of a problem

unicornjam said:

"Mouth twisted into a frown."

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I've seen this (and stuff like it) in a lot of books by bestselling authors.

Matera the Mad said:

I would rather read that someone's eyebrows "pulled together" than that they "drew closer together due to the action of tensing muscles". But not too often, please. lol

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Your post made me realize something: it's not that eyebrows pulled together is all that horrific, but that it's used over and over again in the series, to the point where I got sick of seeing it. The author couples nearly every line of dialogue or action with a stock facial expression like eyebrows pulled together, rolled my eyes, eyes tightened, his lips twisted into a smile, his jaw clenched, he rearranged his features into a frown, I scowled, to the point where it seems like all that happens in the book is characters make faces at each other.

Showing emotion is all well and good, but when a book reads like a game of charades, you're overdoing it.

As for the "twisted into a smile" or "smile played at her lips" I think this is just some writers' way of getting around the problem that there aren't a lot of similes for smile (grin and ???) and smile alone gets pretty static. It does sound pretty contrived, though.

The problem is show vs. tell without the help of a real actor. So, to show emotions, we rely (probably too much) on the smiles, nods, frowns, shrugs, eye-rollings, sighs, etc. In movies, the actors do all the work -- a great actor can probably show five emotions at the same time without even moving a muscle.

It's a dilemma to a writer: how can you express emotions when we frown upon (pun intended) "telling." We don't want to just say, "he's happy" or "he's troubled." So we end up writing a lot of smiles and frowns.

I think they're perfectly fine in first draft. Smile and frown away. But in rewrites, we need to go through them and see if the emotions are obvious already in the dialogue and situations, without doing so much stage direction. So, instead of pulling strings on the character, let the readers be the character's proxy -- that means, if your readers are frowning while your character is supposed to (but not "written" to do so), then you've succeeded.

I don't see anything wrong with "rolled her eyes at him." That's a common construct that I experience in real life. I guess "rolled her eyes" would be perfectly fine, and I can see the amusement of the "at him" part, but really...it doesn't strike me as odd. The "at him" gets across that this wasn't just an eye roll of general disgust, but an expression directed specifically at the person who rasied her ire.

I teach 8th grade, so I've definitely said, "Don't roll your eyes at me--I'm trying to tell you how to improve your grade!" more than once.

I'm with IdiotsRUs on this one. These things don't get to me unless they're truly egregious.

--Q

Quossum said:

I don't see anything wrong with "rolled her eyes at him." That's a common construct that I experience in real life. I guess "rolled her eyes" would be perfectly fine, and I can see the amusement of the "at him" part, but really...it doesn't strike me as odd. The "at him" gets across that this wasn't just an eye roll of general disgust, but an expression directed specifically at the person who rasied her ire.

I teach 8th grade, so I've definitely said, "Don't roll your eyes at me--I'm trying to tell you how to improve your grade!" more than once.

I'm with IdiotsRUs on this one. These things don't get to me unless they're truly egregious.

--Q

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Ditto--BTW parent of teen here. Any of you who don't like this phrase want describe this action "appropriately"? Let's say character is in a group and the eye roll has to be a meaningful communication between two members of the group. Go for it!

When someone says Bob rolled his eyes at Mary, I know exactly what just happened. Pretty common idiom, if you ask me.

Sorry, since I've started writing, there are plenty of things that bug me when I'm reading that never did before. I refuse to add this one.