Revealing Character Through Body Language

The human body is the best picture of the human soul. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

It’s a scientific fact: body language speaks volumes about what’s truly in our hearts and minds. Postures, facial expressions, mannerisms, gestures, movements, the way someone holds his arms, what his eyes focus on — all these things, no matter how subtle, divulge what a person may be feeling at any given moment.

Some believe that talking is our primary mode of communication. But experts have found that we make more evaluations about a person based on what we see than on what we hear. Researchers say that 93% of all communication is non-verbal. That’s right, only 7% of communication is based on what we say.

Whether we are conscious of it or not, we are constantly decoding the visual signals of the people we encounter every day. We don’t need words to tell us whether someone is happy, anxious, defensive, hostile, affectionate, relaxed, self-conscious or sad. We’re able to intuit these feelings from an involuntary display of physical expressions.

How perfectly this works in literature that seeks to dramatize characters rather than tell about them. Yet a common mistake among beginning writers is to rely on emotional labels that merely report how characters feel. Some examples:

Sophie was terrified.
David felt enormous grief.
John stared angrily.
I felt elated.

Such labels tell us virtually nothing about these characters’ emotions. And it reduces the prose to its least interpretative level. That’s because while the reader can intellectualize concepts such as terror, grief, anger and happiness, he cannot feel them. By showing how emotions and attitudes manifest in the body, you allow readers to participate. Rather than being told about your characters, the reader is forced to see.

Deborah Eisenberg, in her story “Mermaids,” deploys a deft command of body language to convey her characters’ emotions as well as the tensions between family members. She describes the adolescent  girl who turned to her father with a look “as if she were gazing at something on the other side of a person”, who stared at him “as red waves came up into her face.” And her father who then “looked down at the table as if it were an old, old. enemy.” She describes the teenage boy who, when asked by his father how his day went, “raised his serious dark eyes and then lowered them again” before responding.

Such non-verbal cues tell us so much more than merely saying that Janey felt a mix of rage, resentment and shame, that Mr. Lasky disapproved of his children, or that his son felt intimidated by him.

For writers who wish to disclose their characters’ inner world, it’s worth exploring the nuances of body language.

Try this. Go through one of your stories or chapters and look for moments where you want to transmit emotion. Eliminate any emotional labels or shortcuts that contain the word “feel” (e.g. I felt humiliated), or adverbs (as in, “He stared at his mother defiantly.”) Now without naming the emotion, convey your character’s feelings through non-verbal signals such as facial expressions, gestures, eye and body movements, postures and so on. Avoid stock expressions like “his heart sank” or “her hands trembled.” Go for something precise, concrete, and original. Allow your reader to be simultaneously outside and inside your character.

Tell me what you discover.

Tags: Add new tag, body language in fiction, character development, facial expressions, revealing character, revealing character emotion through gestures, using body language to reveal character

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 at 1:55 pm and is filed under Characterization, Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.