Essential information in a conversation is often conveyed silently, by a gesture or other body language.
You can use your characters' physicality to create a vivid, non-stereotyped physical presence for your characters. This might include gesture, posture, gait, or tics. For now, let’s focus on gait, the way a character walks.
My dog is a slim, short-haired rescue with a ginger-blonde 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 problematic, because Otto seen this way is just a visual cliché — exactly what to avoid in writing. Otto is also useful for this reflection precisely because he's a very average dog. He is 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 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 is feeling confident, he saunters with a swivel in his hips. For all his lack of pedigree, it makes him seem quite fancy, that runway model's walk — not to mention his dark-rimmed tawny eyes that evoke Nefertiti's.
In Helen Schulman's 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 Hersleder. 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. And somehow they also give the fairly egregious Hershleder a likeability boost as well.
Disorders of gait. When my husband was in medical school, there was one lecture that was so popular that he invited me to attend it. The professor who taught disorders of gait -- the diagnosis of neurological conditions through observing a patient's manner of walking — was wonderful and funny. One of the things I took away was how much we express pathology through our bodies. Imagine that each of us has a disorder which is the culmination of everything that's happened in their life.
In Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, characters are 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 the scene in 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 vividly — 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 together — so as to reveal their personality. Without dwelling on physical description of the characters themselves, write a new scene where your protagonist does some activity involving 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 make it lead into bigger part of the story. The dynamism will help grab your readers attention. You can have more than one character, but again, don’t worry about physical description of them or summaries of who the characters are at this point. Focus on action.