Beyond the Easy Gesture in Fiction

Oh, those flashing eyes!

The other day, I laughed when I read the recent tweet of a fellow writer: “There’s a lot of ‘flashing eyes’ in this draft. Need to fix.”

Our fictional characters certainly do flash their eyes. They also roll them, grind their jaws, blink, sneer, grimace, and smile in varying degrees from crookedly to unabashed. They shrug, cross their arms, tremble, and shake their heads like imaginary marionettes.

What are your go-to gestures or expressions when you write? I tend to overdo shrugs, blinks and nods.

Write beyond the the easy gesture

It’s important to make our character’s actions fresh. Every gesture doesn’t have to be symphonic, grand, or weird, but don’t settle for easy. Nothing is worse than a parade of hollow stage directions.

Why have your character take a long sip of beer if, instead, he can “splash beer on his mustache and put the can down without managing to take a drink.” (Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage)

Or, instead of smiling slyly, Mother might “set the edges of her top teeth against the swordtips of her bottom teeth and smiled as if she could hiss.” (Laura Kaschiske’s Suspicious River)

I remember reading this line in a novel: “Dad put his hand in his pants pocket and jingled his change.” This commonplace, almost cliche gesture didn’t take much effort on the author’s part.

A more effective hand gesture might be: “His hands work through his pockets like hands moving underwater.” (A. Manette Ansay, Vinegar Hill)

Writer Mary Gaitskill’s characters don’t often smile, but when they do, she adds an indication of emotion that give the smile weight, as you can see in these examples from her short story collection Because They Wanted To:

His smile snagged and lapsed.
His smirk wobbled uncertainly.
Erin’s smile stuck, and she halted uncertainly.
His smile was watery, his lips felt weak–why was he smiling at all?
She smiled with tight, terse mystery.

Use sensory details

How our characters express themselves is important because actions and movements externalizes a person’s emotions. A tangible sensory detail is better than an abstraction.

For example, Glen’s angry frustration is clear when he “brought both his fists down hard on his thighs, pounding them half a dozen times before he lifted his hands and held them in front of him, open and extended.” (Dorothy Allison in Bastard out of Carolina)

Consider the gestures in a wild scene from Disobedience by Jane Hamilton. A mother races to rescue her adolescent daughter, who disguises herself as a boy in a Civil War reenactment, from a group of men intent on finding out whether she is a girl or boy by stripping her:

She was running as hard as she could, hurling herself toward the crowd of men near the water. She wasn’t going to stop, wasn’t going to slow down, she was going to slice off their hands, their arms, cut through their hearts, whatever stood in her way, a regular Lizzie Borden, whack, whack, whack.
“What the fuck!”
“Jesus, lady!”
That silver blade whirred, the air streamed near the men’s throats. Some of them jumped, parting the way, others stumbled backward. It was her pop eyes, the pitch of her whine, and her spastic propeller arm, as much as the knife, I think, that made them clear the path.

The mom doesn’t simply run fast, she hurls herself. She isn’t waving a knife, she has a spastic propeller arm. Readers can see, hear and feel the emotions.

Gestures are the most memorable things about the characters we love in good movies. They occupy the actor in a credible way. They are important considerations also for our fictional actors.

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Linda K. Sienkiewicz is a writer, poet, and artist.
Learn more about her multi-award winning novel, In the Context of Love.
Learn more about her picture book, Gordy and the Ghost Crab.
Learn more about her poetry chapbook, Security

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