One of my favorite things to do while writing dialogue is giving my characters physical cues. A character can take a cup off a shelf and fumble it, quirk an eyebrow, or duck behind a door, and all these things give the reader clues about what their emotional state is without explicitly telling the reader.

Don’t get me wrong, sometimes we do need to tell the reader things. Occasionally, it is just more appropriate, voicier, or honestly just funnier to have characters tell us things as they see them. Again, Tamsyn Muir is a great example of this, especially in Nona the Ninth.

Physical cues are also a great way to ask your reader to invest more in your story: by asking them to figure out what a character’s actions mean, you’re presenting readers with a fascinating puzzle. Why did that topic upset him so much he spilled his coffee? What’s going on there? Why does she recoil every time someone mentions the summer?

That said, it’s really easy to rely on physical cues that work anywhere. You might notice your characters rolling their eyes all the time, scoffing, waving something off, blinking in disbelief, or any kind of action that’s nonspecific to a space. These actions aren’t necessarily bad writing, but overusing anything can be a little annoying for a reader. There are only so many eyes that can roll before things stop feeling believable. A good solution to keeping things fresh is to make use of the environment that your characters are in.

Here are a few of my favorite tips to help you write scenes, even if they’re dialogue heavy, that take the most advantage of your space.

What’s unique about this location compared to others in your book? Often, when you find yourself getting stuck repeating the same physical cues over and over, an easy fix is to take advantage of something in this setting that doesn’t appear in other places in your book. Why raise an eyebrow when your character can hold up a lobster sardonically?

A question I like to ask myself especially is: can a scene be doing more for me than it already is? What layers can I work with here to give the story even more depth? What else can I be using this scene to show? Scenes where the characters talk a lot are very fun (often some of the most hilarious in the book!), but they don’t just have to be talking heads. You can use these scenes to dive deep into the setting– characters walking along windy battlements– or advancing other plotlines (like falling in love! learning new things about each other, training, etc!).

What’s the location telling you about your scene? If the place where you’re having characters talk or inhabit it’s that memorable, then consider swapping it out for another one. After all, you only have a finite number of places in your book that your characters are going to visit. Why not make them cool?

Doing is almost always better than sitting. I attacked this more specifically in my post on why meal scenes often don’t work. A lot of it comes down to keeping your characters seated for long periods of time. You eliminate a lot of opportunities for them to move around and do things with the environment and instead force them to rely more on facial shifts.

What would catch your eye or interest if you were in this space? Features, interesting things? What kind of accidents might happen here that might not happen elsewhere? My general rule of thumb with coincidence tends to be to make things worse if it’s going to affect the main plot and make things better if it’s more or less inconsequential. Maybe lean on that here as well! Can a decorative dish fall off a wall (and maybe the love interest catches it if they’re dexterous, or flubs it if they’re not)? What kind of interesting small problems can you present you characters with? Navigating them together will also build closeness on the micro level, which is useful to building the relationship/trust you need often to pull off major climactic moments.

That said, can you still make sitting work? I mean, probably. If you’re good enough and creative enough, you can make almost anything work, which is why it’s so difficult to give decent writing advice. Sometimes it’s fun to dunk on common advice just to prove that you’re talented enough to pull off commonly naysaid things (like prologues, for example, which I actually tend to dislike on principle).

Anyway, the reader’s focus has to go on the most exciting thing. That’s usually where things go wrong in fiction– the reader is paying more attention to something else that’s detracting from their enjoyment of the work.

Can your character sit for eight hours absorbed in an MMO? Hell yeah! The work then becomes less about describing their physical condition as it does about describing their character in the game (again, following the action) who is likely not sitting.

Or even if your character is just sitting, they’re likely not just sitting. I’m thinking about Chihiro in that iconic moment from Spirited Away when she rides the train over the water from Yubaba’s bathhouse to Swamp Bottom. Chihiro passes by all these strange places, a foreigner in the world of spirits, and she has all this time to think about what she really wants and what she really came here for. It’s incredibly evocative and lonely, and anyone who’s traveled by themselves knows that feeling.

Your job as the writer is to work the angles, to set the scene so that even when nothing is happening, we feel like something is going on. Something is shifting.

Show us something about the characters. I may have already touched on this in the other sections, but ultimately this is what I hope giving characters more physicality does. As a reader, I just want to know more about them and who they are! While there are some general trends (clenching fists when angry, winking when flirty or silly, laughing when mad or happy), people show and process emotion in different ways.

Lean into this! It’s such a great way to develop your characters. Do you have a very serious character who is always buttoned up and the picture of perfection at their job? Give them a goofy little hobby that they practice in their downtime! The reader will feel delighted when a character they thought they new as a bad boy motorcycle mechanic suddenly pulls out some embroidery floss and starts making friendship bracelets while waiting in line. Or when the homebody has her phone set to a foreign language so she can get used to the characters more.

As a rule, most people are deeply interesting. They don’t always show it extravagantly 100% of the time. Your work as a writer is to make the most of those little moments to show more of the strangeness peeking through.

As usual, if you liked this and you’d like to support my habit of chatting about craft, you can buy me a coffee below. Or, if you’re looking for a freelance editor for you fiction needs, I also offer editing services over at Constellation Editorial.