Actions Speak Louder

Writer’s dilemma: “Show, don’t tell.” “But how do I show somebody who’s uneasy? Isn’t that why we have the adjective ‘uneasy’ in the first place — sort of shorthand for all the… the stuff an uneasy person might do?”

Um, no.

Enter The Emotion Thesaurus, a (weekly?) Thursday feature at The Bookshelf Muse.

You start to type how your [Main Character] is cringing in terror and then stop. You glance back a page and shake your head. Somebody cringed in the last scene — can’t use that one. Hot, shuddering breaths? Nope, breathing’s already come up a million times in this book, so that beat won’t work. You need something different, something unique to show fear. His eyes widened? His face was a frozen mask? Pu-leeze. The POV police are screaming at the thought.

The joy and energy starts to leak out of you. The excitement that brought you here is fading. You can’t seem to find the right way to show the rawness of your character’s fear. Everything action you come up with seems trite or hollow or cliché.

Reality trickles in: the coffee’s even colder now, and the mailman has gone. Your flyers are probably out there on the step, about to blow away. And of course the eerie silence means your dog no longer needs to go outside. You sag in your chair, defeated by a descriptive beat.

As you leave to mop up Mr. Ruffy’s mess, you glance at the computer screen and think, if only I had a thesaurus of emotional beats.

…Now, if you draw a blank on how to show your character’s emotion through a physical action (a beat), we can help. Each Thursday we will introduce new cardinal emotions to our thesaurus, offering you an ‘idea bank’ for the times when you get stuck. You can scroll through our lists, and see if one of our ideas sparks one of your own.

For instance, here’s a selection from yesterday’s post, on “impatience”:

• Crossed arms
• A tapping foot
• Clicking fingernails against a table
• Narrowing eyes, a look of intense focus that can be mistaken for anger
• Attention snaps toward small sounds or movement
• Complaining to others or mumbling a complaint to self under the breath: “Where is he?” or “What is taking so long?”
• Holding a drink or plate of food to be polite but not drinking/eating it
• An ingenuine smile
• Fussing with appearance (brushing lint from a sleeve, applying lip gloss, checking fingernails)
• Door or window watching
• Whining, grumbling or pouting (small children)
• Changing places to wait (crossing a room, going from sitting to standing, choosing a different chair)
• Fiddling with items on a table (turning a coffee cup, tearing up a napkin, flipping through a book without reading)
• Uncrossing and recrossing legs
• Rooting in a purse for a distraction, checking/rechecking a phone for messages
• A focused stare, seemingly at nothing
• A repeated habit of running hands through hair

Clever idea, well-executed.

They’ve apparently been at it only since January, so they may not have gotten around (yet) to just what you’re looking for — the exact sort of adrenalin bursting in the bloodstream, the precise variety of nail biting, the source of the whimper. Give ’em time: stop crossing your arms, tapping a foot, clicking those fingernails on a table, staring at nothing. And post a request in their comments. They’re waiting to hear from you — grumbling, pouting, crossing the room to look out the window, crossing and recrossing their legs. (And until you speak up, staring, focused, at literally nothing.)

[hat tip to What Time Is It Again?]