As I read the excellent blog posts this past week here on 8LW, I couldn’t help doing two things: 1) ordering multiple resources recommended in the posts and the comments, and 2) contemplating gesture and physical interaction in my own WIP. I am woefully guilty of using my own short-hand in first drafts, words or phrases for which I’ll search later so I can replace them with better descriptions.
For example, in my current WIP, I seem to be fixated on sighing. A quick read of the scenes I’ve written this past week revealed more sighing than any person should be allowed (in reading or in practice) in a lifetime. These are placeholders for now, though, and when I’m ready to replace them, I’ll be turning to resources like Navarro’s What Every Body is Saying and Ackerman and Puglisi’s Emotion Thesaurus. But I also started looking at the ‘bodies in motion’ aspect of my book from a different angle, and the possibility of using it to help define characters not only through their own non-verbal clues, but how they read those clues in others, as well. Continue reading →