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it's all in the shoulders

There's an interesting website called The Nonverbal Dictionary here, which is a great source of ideas when you're trying to describe the way people move when they talk to each other. There's a particularly interesting section on the shoulder-shrug display. In 1872 (we are told) Charles Darwin identified an interrelated set of thirteen body motions, from the head to the toes, used worldwide to show helplessness, resignation, and uncertainty with secondary meanings depending on the nature of the interaction; in courtship a shoulder shrug often indicates friendly intent.

Have a look at the Nonverbal Dictionary, because it's bound to give you a new appreciation for the way you can use body language in your writing.

In the meantime, it's useful to see what other authors have managed to accomplish, through a combination of concrete descriptive details and short-cuts.

'We also have many wounded.' He touched his own bandaged shoulder. 'And no hope of reinforcements.' Julian, Gore Vidal

from Dorothy Dunnett's novels:

The glare in Felix's eyes was replaced by a look of normal exasperation. His shoulders slackened. He said, 'I told you. You shouldn't have jumped in after it.'

A slight movement of the fat man's shoulders appeared to constitute a bow. "Then continue, Madame Katelina, with your lively history," said the vicomte.

'Why?' asked the Dame de Doubtance, and settling herself in her chair, smoothed out her thick skirts with one bezelled claw. 'Dear Francis. Do you wish to ask me something so private?'

Nicholas embraced his knees with one hand and waved the other. "Well, tell him!"

from A Soldier of the Great War, Mark Helprin

"I don't know," Alessandro said, waving his arms in the air as if to indicate confusion. "It just came to me."

He proudly pointed at his own chest. "Not me. Never. I never shed my own blood."

"I didn't say I would." Orfeo cocked his arm and made a fist. "Will you fight?"

"Were you in the army?" Alessandro asked Arturo. Arturo bowed slightly and blinked. When he bobbed up he said, "I was an armorer in Trento."

The scholar touched his glasses. "What did you do before the war?"

I suppose you might look at these bits of body language (and the facial expressions discussed earlier) as the mortar that holds the dialogue together and allows the author to build something (that's a bit of stretch, but I'll work on rephrasing it). It's sometimes possible to have a short run of pure conversation, but it's very difficult to pull that off effectively. Elmore Leonard can do it once in a while, but otherwise it's hard to find good examples.

A useful exercise is to take a scene with dialogue from a favorite novel and strip out everything that isn't between quotation marks.

More tomorrow on this.

March 22, 2004 09:12 AM

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