Body Language
using gait to define character
Essential information in a conversation is often conveyed silently, by a gesture or other body language.
You can use physicality to create a vivid physical presence for your characters. This might include gesture, posture, gait, or tics. When my husband was in medical school, there was one lecture that was so popular that he invited me to attend it: disorders of gait — the diagnosis of neurological conditions through observing a patient's manner of walking. The professor was wonderful and funny. He brought in patients to demonstrate some disorders and acted out others. One of the things I took away was how much we express pathology through our bodies. Even when body language isn’t the result of a medical disorder, the way a person moves is often the culmination of everything that's happened in their life. So, for now, let’s focus on gait, the way a character walks.
I’ll start with a slightly off-center subject — a dog — because dogs are not often the central characters of adult fiction, and secondary or tertiary characters are especially likely to be rendered with clichéd descriptions. (I also happen to believe that including animals, whether domesticated, feral or wild, is an excellent way to expand a narrative world.) My own dog, Otto, is a slim, short-haired rescue with a ginger coat and an up-curled tail. He's a supermutt, meaning there are so many breeds in him, you can't distinguish them. He reminds a lot of people of the dog emoji on their cell phones. That description will give you a good idea of his looks, but it's terrible for fiction, because it relies on a visual cliché. Otto is useful for this reflection precisely because he's such a very average dog. He’s a subject, like the fat cook or the sweet little old lady, who is likely to be rendered in a stereotypical manner. He also can't talk, and I don't have a great deal of access to (or very high guesstimation of) his inner life, so he's a subject who must be rendered through external observation of his body language and gesture. To make Otto unique, visually, I need to tell the reader something unusual about this very basic hound. I find it in his walk. When Otto walks, he saunters, there’s a swivel in his hips. For all his lack of pedigree, it makes him seem quite fancy, this runway model's walk — not to mention his dark-rimmed tawny eyes that evoke Nefertiti's. If I wanted to render my dog in fiction, I’d go for one or both of those details because of the interesting contrast between a male rescue mutt and an icon of female beauty.
Let’s look at a couple of literary examples:
In Helen Schulman's gorgeous novel The Revisionist, her character Hershleder decides to indulge himself by going to see a movie after work and then stopping in at the Oyster Bar for some briny aphrodesia and cocktails before hitting the commuter rail to go home. In the "cool stone vagina" of a Grand Central tunnel, he nearly steps in a pile of excrement, which presages the shitstorm to come for Hershleder in this novel. The moment when he avoids stepping in the shit is striking and original: "The passageway smelled like a pet store. The horrible inevitable decay of everything biological, the waste, the waste! Hershleder did a little shocked pas de bourrée over a pretzel of human shit, three toe-steps, as lacy as a dancer’s." The dichotomy of the dance step and the shit create enormous energy and humor here. It accomplishes so much: foreshadowing, world building that evokes the grubby, poorly maintained public spaces of Manhattan in Hershleder’s era, and a vivid, funny, entirely novel depiction of this fairly egregious schlemiel / anti-hero that gives him a much needed likeability boost as well.
In Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, characters are most often delineated not through visual descriptions of their appearance, but through their actions and their relationships with other characters. As a result, they are much more than skin deep. Take for example this scene from Chapter 3, in which Aunt Sylvie throws ice chunks at a pack of dogs that are bothering her as she walks into town:
We turned the corner and saw Sylvie in the road ahead of us, chucking chunks of ice at four or five dogs. She would pick up a bit of ice and toss it from hand to hand, walking backward, while the dogs followed after her and circled behind her, yapping.We saw her pelt one squat mongrel in the ribs, and all the dogs scattered. She sucked her fingers and blew into her cupped hands, and then picked up another piece of ice just as the dogs came back and began yapping and circling again. Her manner was insouciant and her aim was deft.
Sylvie's stance, her scrappiness and her state of being somewhat embattled by these dogs all coalesce to depict her far more intimately that if we learned just how her features looked or what she was wearing. We are also reminded of an earlier moment when the two girls, Ruth and Lucille, alone on the lake after an afternoon of ice skating, threw snowballs to chase away what were quite probably the same dogs.
We see Sylvie crouching and blowing. We see her deftly chucking the ice. We see what sort of thing — dogs — makes her move this way. And above all, in the echoes between this scene and the earlier one with the girls, we glimpse a deep connection that exists between Sylvie and her orphaned nieces, something that goes unparsed but nonetheless clearly reveals a great deal about how the three of them will live their lives.
PROMPT:
Focus on the body movements of a character — or two characters — so as to reveal personality. Without dwelling on physical descriptions of the characters themselves, write a new scene describing some physical movement in a space that is important to the coming action. The idea is to focus on the action not the actor. Your action may be a small scale motion that you zero in on, and it may seem minor in importance at first, but keep focus on the movement itself and see if you can’t make it connect to or presage some aspect of your story. The dynamism will help grab your readers attention. Don’t worry about description of faces or bodies or summaries of who the characters are for this, just focus on the action.