How To Make Your Writing Less Stiff 5
Dredging this back up from way back.
Make sure your characters move, but not too much during heavy dialogue scenes. E.g. two characters sitting and talking—do humans just stare at each other with their arms lifeless and bodies utterly motionless during conversation? No? Then neither should your characters. Make them…
Cross their legs/their arms
Shift around to get comfortable
Touch their face/their hair
Fiddle with buttons or jewelry
Touch their weapons/gadgets/phones
Move from chair to tabletop
Bonus points if these are tics that serve to develop your character, like a nervous fiddler, or if one moves a lot and the other doesn’t—what does that say about the both of them? This is where “show don’t tell” really comes into play.
As in, you could say “he’s nervous” or you could show, “He fidgets, constantly glancing at the clock as sweat beads at his temples.”
This site is full of discourse on telling vs showing so I’ll leave it at that.
In the Sci-fi WIP that shall never see the light of day, I had a flashback arc for one male character and his relationship with another male character. On top of that, the flashback character was a nameless narrator for Reasons.
Enter the problem: How would you keep track of two male characters, one who you can't name, and the other who does have a name, but you can’t oversaturate the narrative with it? I did a few things.
Nameless Narrator (written in 3rd person limited POV) was the only narrator for the flashback arc. I never switched to the boyfriend’s POV.
Boyfriend had only a couple epithets that could only apply to him, and halfway through their relationship, NN went from describing him as “the other prisoner” to “his cellmate” to “his partner” (which was also a double entendre). NN also switched from using BF’s full name to a nickname both in narration and dialogue.
BF had a title for NN that he used exclusively in dialogue, since BF couldn’t use his given name and NN hadn’t picked a new one for himself.
Every time the subject of the narrative switched, I started a new paragraph so “he” never described either character ambiguously mid-paragraph.
Is this an extreme example? Absolutely, but I pulled it off according to my betas.
The point of all this is this: Epithets shouldn’t just exist to substitute an overused name. Epithets de-personalize the subject if you use them incorrectly. If your narrator is thinking of their lover and describing that person without their name, then the trait they pick to focus on should be something equally important to them. In contrast, if you want to drive home how little a narrator thinks of somebody, using depersonalizing epithets helps sell that disrespect.
Fanfic tends to be the most egregious with soulless epithets like "the black-haired boy" that tell the reader absolutely nothing about how the narrator feels about that black-haired boy, espeically if they're doing so during a highly-emotional moment.
As in, NN and BF had one implied sex scene. Had I said “the other prisoner” that would have completely ruined the mood. He’s so much more than “the other prisoner” at that point in the story. “His partner,” since they were both a combat team and romantically involved, encompassed their entire relationship.
The epithet also changed depending on what mood or how hopeless NN saw their situation. He’d wax and wane over how close he believed them to be for Reasons. NN was a very reserved character who kept BF at a distance, afraid to go “all in” because he knew there was a high chance of BF not surviving this campaign. So NN never used “his lover”.
All to say, epithets carried the subtext of that flashback arc, when I had a character who would not talk about his feelings. I could show you the progression of their relationship through how the epithets changed.
I could show you whenever NN was being a big fat liar about his feelings when he said he's not in love, but his narration gave him away. I could show you the exact moment their relationship shifted from comrades to something more when NN switched mid-paragraph from "his cellmate" to "his partner" and when he took up BF's nickame exclusively in the same scene.
I do the same thing in Eternal Night when Elias, my protagonist, stops referring to Dorian as "it" and "the vampire" instead of his name the moment they collide with a much more dangerous vampire, so jarringly that Elias notices in his own narration—the point of it being so explicit is that this degredation isn't automatic, it's something he has to conciously do, when everyone else in his clan wouldn't think twice about dehumanizing them.
Any literary device should be used with intent if you want those layers in your work. The curtains are rarely just blue. Whether it’s a simile with a deliberate comparison or an epithet with deliberate connotations, your readers will pick up on the subtext, I promise.
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