Do you struggle with writing new and fresh body language and emotional description in your stories? Today Stacy Juba is bringing us some tips to freshen and liven up our character’s emotions. Don’t miss it!
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TRANSCRIPT STARTS HERE:
Kat
Hi, Stacy. How are you doing today?
Stacy
Oh, very good.
Kat
Hey, everyone. We have Stacy Juba, my friend, with us today. She is my favorite editor in the whole world. In case anyone’s new to the podcast, could you give us a little rundown of who you are?
Stacy
Yes, I’m a fiction author of mystery and romantic comedy and some young adult books. I’m also a freelance developmental editor and line editor and the founder of Shortcuts for Writers, where I teach online courses for writers to help them simplify the writing and editing process and fit writing into a busy life.
Kat
Yes, which is everything we need, basically. You have an awesome course on self editing and getting ready to push out the manuscript, which I think is amazing. And I tell everyone about it. We’re going to talk about something else today, but just talking about that course a little bit with editing. I saw the other day that somebody was putting out memes about writers being all frazzled because they’re editing, or like, I hate editing. I hate all that. And it’s so funny to me, this journey that we have of like, you get something on the page. And I think what we hate about editing is that, A, we don’t really know how to do it. So that’s why I like your course, because it goes through a lot of… because it’s more than just finding the missing periods, right?
Kat
It’s the big things, the big structural things down to the word choice and sentence structure down to the periods and the little things like that. It’s a big all encompassing endeavor. So you need to have some system.
Kat
Yeah, because I think that helps that you’re a developmental editor when you put together that course. It was not just about like, do you have the Oxford comma or not? Developmental editing, can you tell us what the difference is with developmental editing? You also do line editing because you know all your grammar, but there’s a big difference.
Stacy
Developmental editing. I created the course based on seeing my editing clients make the same mistakes over and over. I was writing the same comments in my editorial letters, so that’s why I decided to create the course as a stepping stone to hiring an editor so that they can save some money, submit their manuscript when it’s further along. But developmental editing is where you give a broad overview of everything from the structure of the plot and is there enough conflict and obstacles and satisfying conclusion to the character development from the major characters to the supporting characters? Do they have a character arc? Does the reader understand their motivations? To the point of view, are you getting into the narrator’s head deeply enough? If you’re writing third person, if you’re writing first person, are you doing it skillfully so it’s not coming across like a diary? The dialog and the pacing, the timeline does everything, add up that you’re writing it. Is it following a timeline so that the date… If you say something happened next week, is it really happening next week? Did you figure out how to put this story into a timeline so that readers understand how much time is passing? And then line editing, which I also go into the course, I also do is… I like line editing because it’s very creative, it’s different from copy editing. So line editing is more like just punching up sentences to make them more vivid and to tighten them up, so they’re more active than passive, make them more colorful. When I work on a client’s meeting script, I do developmental editing in some degree of line editing together, but it depends on how far along the manuscript is because obviously if a more advanced writer submits a manuscript that they’ve done several drafts and it’s further along, then there’s less structural issues. And as I’m going along reading it, I can punch up the word choice and everything, strengthen the sentences. But if it’s a beginner writer, they’re going to have to make a lot of big structural rewrites. They’re not getting deep enough into their character’s point of view. They have a lot of plot holes. The writing is very passive. Then obviously doing the line edits, they would be obsolete because they have to do so much rewriting anyway. So in that case, I’ll do line editing just as an example, this is how you make a sentence more active. But this is an example of how you’re overusing certain words and we can make it more vivid. And then copy editing is really the nitty gritty Oxford comma kind of thing, the grammar and punctuation, and then that’s the last step.
Kat
But it’s interesting how as writers, we seem to think we all go through this, I think, or maybe it was just me, where you start out writing and it takes so much to get that story on the paper that by the time you hit the end, you think you’re done. Maybe there will be commas and dialog tags and things. Your first run through with an editor is just like, oh, it’s so eye opening to be like, that everything that’s in my head that I thought was on the page, is not necessarily clear to anyone else who’s not in my own head.
Stacy
Right. The first editorial letter can be a shock. It could be a 10-page single space letter, telling you all these different things and the first reaction could be, oh, no, I’m not going to pull off the rewrite.
Kat
Exactly. I remember getting my first and this was in 2001. So the internet was a baby, and we were all told at that time not to trust it. There’s nothing out there that’s good. And things were not blocked off, let’s say, things that nobody wants popping up on their screen. Now I look back and somebody was kind enough, I say the word kind now, to send me like five pages on really telling me why it wasn’t good enough yet, but then pointed out the good things about it. But it was so disheartening to me because I thought, oh, I spent like 19 or 20, 21, or something like that. Then I spent a year and a half. Now you have the internet, you can go out and find out. Like you said, you put together the course because you kept seeing the same errors. We make the same errors. We’re not alone in this. We all tend to think that it’s an easier process than it is. But we could talk about the full structure, but today we’re going to talk more about body language and punching up the sentences like you like to say, which I think is fun. And punching up the description and emotion. That’s a big job to do without not… I feel like we can either not do it or we become really angsty. So how do we do it without becoming super dramatic? I’ve gotten that edit, too, way back. Maybe it still happens. I don’t know. We’ll see with the new one. But I remember getting that edit. It’s like, this person is really dramatic. Could you notch down on the dramaticism or whatever? And I think that’s because I was overly describing every reaction that they might have to something. So what do you think are the misconceptions first, of when we’re writing and we’re trying to get the story onto the page and the characters’ reactions? Let’s talk about the misconception of putting too little and then putting too much.
Stacy
Yeah, I think you know as a writer what your characters are feeling.
Kat
Good point.
Stacy
And you have tendency to write that in dialog, but it’s hard for the reader to understand where that character is coming from. Why are they saying that? Why are they reacting that way? If you’re a narrator, you might not have gotten into their head enough. So when they have this big explosion, like yelling at someone, we’re like, where did that come from? Because it’s just, you can describe it enough, how they were feeling. Or a lot of times I’ll see a lack of body language and nonverbal communication and details in a scene where that’s a dialog scene with a few different characters. Writers have a tendency to make it dialog heavy, and we’re not seeing as much of what is the character doing before they say the dialog. In the case of the narrator, what is the narrator thinking? Or if they feel like their anger rising in them and embarrassed their faces, like pinkening or turning a shade of pink, just little hints to show what the characters are feeling. You need to learn how to weave that in to your scene in a fresh and unique way. Because the other problem is that we have a tendency to see the same words over and over again.
Kat
We do latch on to certain words that we were writing.
Stacy
Well, there’s a couple of things. First, it’s beginner writers have a tendency to just tell us how the character is feeling rather than showing us. So it could be like, he looked mad or he looked embarrassed, or she felt, is another word, she felt scared or she felt a little uneasy. So telling us rather than showing us. And then the other component is the repeating of these same words throughout the manuscript. I actually created a looks and gazes guide for writers, a free guide, because the number one overused word I see in the manuscript is look. She looked at him, he looked at her, she looked upset, he looked mad. And she looked up, she looked down. He gazed to her, she gazed to him. And that’s just not very fresh writing. If you submitted five pages to an editor and they told you, you overused a word like look in those five pages, you’re probably doing it through the whole manuscript. So if you did a search for that word, you’re probably going to find that you used it 300 times. Or another popular one is eyes. She looked into his eyes. He gazed into her eyes. She lowered her eyes. So you want to… there’s nothing wrong with using eyes or using look sometimes, but you don’t want to overdo it. And you want to make sure you’re not just relying on one or two aspects of body language and just overlooking everything else or nonverbal communication because there’s other emotion categories you could draw upon when you’re writing. So just becoming more aware of that.
Kat
Yes. And I think that takes work. Working with editors, people who are a little more advanced, people who aren’t in your own head, so they’re really reading it. You’re reading it coming at it fresh. You don’t know anything about it, so you’re reading it like a reader would. And if the reader doesn’t understand, they don’t see what we see in our head. And I remember some of the best advice was from this one editor who was kind enough to read at least the first 30 pages or so, and then immediately knew because she was a professional, what was wrong with the book? And she said, you cannot give us every description of what’s going on with your characters. You have to allow and let go and let the reader fill in the blanks. And that was really eye opening to me because I thought that what I was reading when I read good books with good description was full description. But what I was doing was filling in the blanks. And she told me, go back and read books that you love and realize that they have very few description and your brain, your imagination is taking off.
Kat
So it’s interesting how then when you start to write, you think you have these weird misconceptions of what you should be writing or even what you have read.
Stacy
Right. You know exactly what’s going on in the scene as you’re writing it, but your readers might not make the same connection. So just like you don’t want to… Like you were talking before about overdoing it, you don’t want to overdo it either. You do want to let readers fill in some of those blanks so you don’t have to… One thing I noticed is that once writers become more aware of nonverbal communication, the importance of weaving it in, they start stringing together a lot of nonverbal communication in one paragraph.
Kat
Oh, right. I do that.
Stacy
I think off the top of my head, yeah. If someone was nervous, they’ll go overboard with describing it.
Kat
Their palm started being sweaty and their knees were shaking. And yes, I have done that. I have done that as well. I went way overboard.
Stacy
Yeah. You just need to take too many of those nonverbal queues and put them together. And I was like, okay, we got the point. We don’t have to… Maybe two of those would work, but we don’t need five of those queues in the same paragraph because then that’s just telling the reader, Hey, did you get the point? She’s nervous. Did you get that? So like you were saying, you want to show it, but you don’t have to go on and on about it because your reader is going to get the message. If you go too overboard with it, they can be like, okay, yeah, I got it, she’s nervous. Let’s just get on with this scene.
Kat
That’s a good point. I guess that’s what I call the inksiness of over dramaticizing the… Is that even a word? I don’t know.
Stacy
And sometimes I think with the inksiness, writers go overboard with the dialog where instead of saying, she felt sad or something, she’ll just say it in the dialog. It’d be like a long, almost telling.
Kat
Especially if ft’s first person, right?
Stacy
Yeah. Or just telling the other person, I’m so sad and this is what… And it’s really, even though it’s in dialog, she’s still really just telling the reader. It’s not coming across as the reader isn’t really feeling it. That, oh, she says, not really. And I think that’s the thing. You want to make an emotional connection with your reader so that they can feel what your character is feeling and relate to them and be like, okay, that’s why she’s reacting this way. But if you just go on and on, I’m so sad. It just go on and on. And dialog, it can come across as angsty. And it can actually have the opposite effect of having your reader get frustrated with the character because she comes across as too much. And we don’t really understand. It’s different if it’s your narrator, we can get into her head and somebody says something and it just, maybe somebody gives her a criticism. And it’s just like she gets a sharp pain where it reminds her of something, or it reminds her of when her mother used to criticize her. So we have that context of why she’s reacting this way. And then it just becomes more three dimensional and believable where if it’s just thinly portrayed and it’s a lot of angst in the dialog without the context. Then it can just be harder for the readers to relate to your characters because they’re not really connecting on an emotional level. You’re just telling rather than showing.
Kat
Yes, I think that’s a really good point, though, because if they can relate it back to why they’re acting like that and weaving in that back story a little bit of like, I don’t know, this will probably be bad. But John said it was becoming more critical with old age, just like her father used to constantly pick on her mother’s blouse, unbuttoning at the top or something. That bringing back the back story of why that would bother someone so much is so much more personal because you start thinking, oh, I know what that person’s like. That’s just like Uncle Joe, who would constantly complain about everything. That’s much more grounding for the reader, I feel like, and much more personal. Because our minds are weird, they can think of 50 things at once. As we’re reading, Uncle Joe can pop up or Grandpa or whoever who was critical or maybe nice or whatever. And you’ll actually have a sweet or weird memory while you’re reading it because the writer has really brought in the fullness of life, the fullness of the richness of what it is to be human. I’m reading Louise Urdrich book, I think that’s how you say her name, The Sentence. And there was one really beautiful line where she’s talking about one person, but she had already introduced another character. She’s talking about this one young man there, who’s there to study the O’Gibbey language. She says, who, Penn, the other character she had already introduced, both admired and resented. And it’s a really short sentence, but it makes you think back to the other character, and it gives you more insight into how complicated relationships are, right? And humans. And it just added another dimension to both of these characters. And it was like this long. And just really cool.
Stacy
Right… And even if you have a scene where it’s going to escalate into anger, where they have this outburst, if you can just weave in a little bit of the nonverbal communication queues so you can see it building. The thing is you can’t get into every character’s head. You don’t want to headhop into what they’re thinking or what their back story is. So you can do that for your narrator of that scene. But for the other characters, you’ve got to rely on what your narrator is observing them do. So it can be these different categories of nonverbal communication. We already talked about the eyes and the eye contact. But then there’s their facial expressions. Is the jaw clenching? Are they frown deepening or biting the lip? Movement, is someone showing dominance by moving forward and stocking forward and looming over them. Or is somebody feeling defensive, their arms are crossed, touched. If you shook someone’s hand, is it a firm hand shake? Or is it like, I think we talked about clammy, limp, sweaty. Because that implies nervousness or uneasiness without coming out and saying, Oh, he looks nervous. The reader just gets that from the limp, clammy handshake.
Kat
Yeah, gross.
Stacy
The gestures, if someone is getting mad, you might see their hands tightening or at their sides. If they’re impatient, they could be drumming their fingers on the table, or foot can be tapping up and down the way your character sits and holds himself with their posture. Is it someone who’s just really casual, just sauntes into the room and straddles the chair. Or someone who is slouching as they’re feeling like they’re being reprimanded or criticized and their shoulders are slumping. If someone interested in leaning forward and wants to hear the next word, or they just look like they’re not even listening.
Kat
They’re just trying to put their earbud in.
Stacy
Yeah. are glancing down at the phone.
Kat
Trying not to have their eyes. What’s interesting about that is it gives… You said that the narrator, so when you’re talking from the… Let’s think of a romance, I guess. Maybe he’s talking, one of the romantic and we’ll just say him. What you’re saying, especially for new writers, he can’t tell the reader what she’s actually feeling. He can only say what’s happening that he can see physically. Let’s say they’re having a conversation, so he can’t say she felt this way or she was thinking she thought something. I do see that.
Stacy
Yeah. You can get into your narrator’s head if you’re having a scene of dialog or something, like we were talking before, you could have them remember something, or they react a certain way because it just triggered something, an emotional trigger for them. You can get into the physiological things like their stomach just getting queasy. or that they can feel the heat rushing up to the back of their neck. But for the other characters, you can’t say how they’re feeling because we’re not in their head. We have to stay close in your narrator’s head. So it’s like what your narrator is observing. So I’ll see this mistake a lot where the writer will unintentionally headhop by saying that even for the narrator, they’ll say her face reddened, but the narrator can’t see her own face reddening. She can see everybody else’s face is reddening, but she can’t see her own. So she can feel the heat creeping up. That’s a common mistake, though, right?
Kat
It is, yeah. Especially in the beginning. And I have also seen the person might stock off, and then suddenly the writer is writing about what that person sees, but they haven’t changed scene. So the person who’s still narrating is still in the house, let’s say, and the other person stomps out the door and down the stairs and past the tree. It’s like, well, how are they seeing that? Are they at the window watching them? Then we need to know that they’re at the window. So it’s like these easy mistakes to make because you as the writer see it all. It’s like an aerial view of this whole movie.
Stacy
Right. Because sometimes I’ll see in the scene where the character actually turned around or something, but then she’ll observe that the other person’s eyes widened or something. And then I’ll put in my track changes, well, how can she see her eyes widen when she turned around? When she’s facing the other way so she can’t see. And it’s tricky as a writer, you have to really visualize it as a movie in your head. And sometimes that just doesn’t come through on the first draft because you’re just trying to get it down, understandably. And the first draft doesn’t have to be perfect. But the problem is when you send the early draft to an editor and you’re paying someone hundreds of dollars to edit an early draft, there’s a lot of mistakes. If you know what to look for, you can catch them yourself so that you can save your money and get an edit on a work that’s much more further along. So the body language and the nonverbal communication is just something every writer needs to pay attention to when you’re in the editing process. Even if you just want to get the scene down fast while you’re writing, and that’s fine, but you have to come back to it and really do editing pass in your book, just looking for the body language and are you showing rather than telling? Do we understand why these characters are acting this way? Do you have a good balance of these different elements? Like, are we getting into your narrator’s head? Is there a balance of what they’re thinking, what they’re feeling physiologically? Are people just always looking at each other and their eyes meeting? Are you burying that and using gestures and head movements and posture and how they’re sitting and standing, facial expressions? And I think just read some good books and really observe how other authors are doing it, really successful authors. Now, with that said, I’ve read a few traditionally published books lately that you could tell were just turned out because I was appalled at how everything came through. But the first chapter was, she looked at him, he looked, he looked at her and I…
Kat
Now you can’t not see it, right?
Stacy
No. And I was like, oh, my gosh, how did this… But it was a big name author who has several books coming out a year.
Kat
They just missed it.
Stacy
But I think they were juseztt trying to get it out and people bought it. It was like this cozy mystery series that has a lot of fans. And I think the earlier books in this series, they spent much more time on and were much more well developed. And then the later books, the writing just kept editing. And I think that’s the thing about editing is that the traditional publishers don’t have as much time to spend on editing as they did in the past. So if you’re a big name author with tons of books out, maybe you can get away with that because we have fans. But most of us can’t get away with that. And you really have to have fresh writing and see these things for yourself. So read a book that you really enjoy and that’s getting a lot of positive reviews and establish authors and really observe how they’re doing the body language and nonverbal communication and internal thought. You’re sure they’ll go and look at each other and it’s fine for them to gaze into each other eyes?
Kat
Maybe once or twice.
Stacy
Right. But you’re going to see a lot of just really nice turns of phrases. It’s like, oh, wow, what a fresh way to say that, or what a unique way to convey that same thing. It’s just see the twist they put on it and just let yourself really just be creative as you’re writing. And if you see yourself writing something that’s cliched, just, again, pretend like you’re watching a movie. What’s the fresh way to describe it?
Kat
What else can I say about that moment other than her hands were sweaty again? Because it is true that we tend to get into this, I don’t know why, but we trip into the same phrases or the same gestures or whatever. Even four, five, six, seven books down the road, for some reason, when you’re just in the book, you end up saying the same thing over and over again. So like you said, sit back and think, okay, where are they? But you really have to have a pretty critical editorial eye at that point. You can’t just be the writer at that point. You really have to be looking and thinking critically of like, what else can I do to deepen this story and maybe have her observe something else or remember a memory or back story, but not sweating palms again? What other senses could I use? Reading other books, I mean, going back to, it’s the one book I’m reading right now, The Sentence, her husband, like the character, rubs his hands together and puts his hands on her face. And she said if she leaned into the warmth of his hands, that’s not t’s not saying she felt secure.
Kat
She’s not saying that, but that’s the sensation you get, not just because of that sentence, but because of the surrounding sentences as well. The dialog that they’re having, he’s reassuring her. Then he puts his hands on her face and she leans into it. You understand as the reader that she feels safe with this man because somebody else could put their hands on your face and it’s a threat. Understanding that a gesture doesn’t necessarily mean anything. It’s whatever you’ve put around it. Shrugging can be perceived as many things.
Stacy
Right. You could just not know. You could be bored or you’d be like, I’m not don’t care, annoyed. I think another thing to do is just observe people and keep a journal. Just watch what people do in different situations. I like that. If you’re in a coffee shop or something, just watch people and how they act, listen to conversations, and even how your friends and family, just pay more attention. That can inspire you to come up with new ways of describing things. And a couple of authors that I think do down for both communication well are like, Jody Cole, something like that, who just writes these really intense, in depth stories about all kinds of really original subjects. I think her writing is really original. So if you could read someone like her. I’ve been reading a lot of Leanne Moriarty lately. Just try some different authors, even outside your genre, to mix it up a little bit and see how they are describing things and just become more aware of it and become more aware of what your crutches are, what are the phrases that you tend to overuse the most and just become more aware of them. Like, eyebrows, I see a lot of eyebrows raising. Every writer has their phrases that they go back to again and again.
Kat
Well, it’s interesting how we suddenly make our characters trained psychologists almost. And I think it goes into we really are intimate with all the characters, or we should be as the writers. But whenever I’m talking to any of my writing clients, it’s like, well, why would they know that that’s what they’re doing? Half the time, we don’t know what we actually feel until it’s lead up to a big blowout. You don’t start out super angry. You start out frustrated, and then another scratch comes, and then another, and then this, and everything starts falling apart. Making our characters so in tune with their own emotions and everyone else’s emotions is just unrealistic. They have to have observances that aren’t always correct, almost. Or they just can’t be super deep all the time. That would be really annoying to be friends with that person.
Stacy
Right. Characters have to be flawed, too, and they can’t understand it. Well, he said that to me because, well, he’s got rejection issues. You don’t want your character like psychoanalyzing everybody. Unless they’re a psychologist. But yeah, I think it’s just coming at it from looking at your own life and people and how everybody has this different perspective. Two people could just have this totally different perspective. And that’s why they’re arguing because they both have experiences that shape them. They both have trigger points that maybe one person gets defensive because it always feels like people don’t listen to her. And the other one could have a history of being criticized or takes anything as criticism. And then when you put those personalities together, they’re going to clash. So the characters might not be aware of why they’re reacting this way because they don’t understand the other person’s perspective. But you as the writer can think about that as you’re writing the book and before you write the book and do some research into different personalities, types and archetypes. And I know you talk a lot about this thing. I think different personality types have positive traits, and then they also have negative traits associated with them. I’m trying to think of an example, someone is really nurturing. You could have a mother character who’s very nurturing. So the positive aspect of that character that she’ll do anything for you and she’s really protective. The negative aspect is that she could be too overprotective and annoy people, annoy her kids, annoy her husband. Maybe she’s too controlling because she just wants to take care of them and wants them to be safe, but she’s discouraging them from what they want to do.
Kat
Yes. Especially if the other character is more of an independent and now they don’t understand each other and she thinks she’s being disrespected and the kid thinks she’s being smothering or whatever. Yeah. Do you see that quite often where they just have a character reaction? I always like to use James Bond because he’s not very conscientious. He’s not very emotionally attached, let’s say. And then you have that character who, when a woman burst into tears, will then have compassion and hug her. And you’re like, no, that doesn’t work. You have to continue with your character, even as they’re learning. But they can’t do a 180 degree turn on how you’ve set them up in the beginning. Or suddenly in a fight, they’re still, even if they are becoming more balanced, they’re still going to react how their personality is. A nurturing person isn’t going to suddenly be like, Well, I’ll abandon everybody because nobody wants me to do anything anymore. I mean, a crisis mode, they’re still going to react exactly as they are. They’re going to go mother hen. So do you see that a lot where people aren’t consistent then with the characters?
Stacy
Is that? Yeah, they’re not consistent because they didn’t really decide early on exactly what the dominant traits are. Or they just changed too drastically at the end. I mean, you definitely want the character to grow and evolve. Everything about them isn’t going to change. What do you want to focus on? What’s their character arc? How do you want them to evolve in the book? They’re not going to become another totally different person. You have to build up to whatever the change is going to be. You have to build up to that. Then some books, some manuscripts, like by beginner authors, you don’t see that build up. It’s just they got from point A to point C, but point B is muddled about how they got there. I think a lot of times that’s just like the lack of clarity when you’re writing about what your character’s personality traits are. So I think when I’m writing a book, I do a lot of free writing from the character’s point of view, just like journaling, like, tell me about yourself or tell me what bothers you.
Kat
Sounds weird to non writers.
Stacy
It sounds weird, but yeah.
Kat
And then writing their trigger points. I love writing. What is the story behind the trigger point? Why does she no longer trust men? What happened?
Stacy
Right. And sometimes it can just be helpful to look through books of archetypes or personality types and looking at the positive and negative traits associated with them. I’m interested in astrology. And there’s an astrologer I follow who talked to Deborah Silverman, which is interesting because she always talks about even looking at the different signs, how they have characteristics associated with them. And she’ll talk about the high road of that sign, the low road, which is the same thing. You know, like a cancer, someone who’s like, I’m a cancer, someone who’s like, again, like the nurturing and homebody and like to take care of people. But then the other, the low road of it might be like being too never wants to leave the house, never wants to do that thing. So it’s just think about whatever personality traits, wherever you get that inspiration, whether it’s from Astrology, whether it’s from archetypes or personality books, wherever you get that inspiration, think about what the high road of that trade is and the low road. And then that will drive how your character reacts in different situations. That will drive what nonverbal communication and body language your characters can use. I think it’s just helpful to think about all of that before you start writing the book, or if you’re already writing the book, then just stop and think, okay, what am I trying to get across with this character’s personality? And how does it come into conflict with this character’s personality? Why is this character acting this way? And just really think about that. And then that’ll help you get a better understanding of them. Because if you’re vague in your mind about their personality, it’s hard to make the reader really understand. Because if you don’t understand it, the reader is not going to.
Kat
The reader is not going to. That’s so true.
Stacy
Right. So you have to understand it as the author, why they’re doing these things and why they’re acting that way. Even though your characters obviously aren’t going to be like psychoanalyzing each other, you’re deliberately putting them in these situations because this is the way you created them and you’re deliberately having them act this way because you’ve created these personalities for them and your job is to show it to the reader without just telling them, this is why she did this or banging them over the head with it, like going, oh, well, you just have to weave in these reactions with the dialog and the storytelling.
Kat
Yeah. So sometimes when you get to the end, you know them so much better, which means you have to go back to the beginning. And then just probably rewrite it. And I have found as a writer, sometimes the beginning scenes, they just don’t work. They were just exploring the character at some point, and they’re just not going to work because of who they’ve really become. Then you just have to chalk it up to practice and write a different scene. And all of that’s going to help you. It’s just going to make the book so much better. It’s going to connect with the reader better, and people are going to love it more. And I have the next book. So can you talk to us about this writing toolkit? What can people expect? You have so many different options. We’ll have all the links in the show notes below. But you have a writing toolkit that is really created to help writers. What we talked about is a lot. Okay, now you guys expect me to go back to my witing toolkit. You’re scared to remember everything you said. So you create things just like the editing course for writers to not have that overwhelm. So what is in this toolkit?
Stacy
So it’s called the Energiser Writing Toolkit: Cheat Sheets for Character Emotions. And the early draft of this was something years ago I created for myself because this was… Nonverbal communication was always an area that I found challenging as a writer. So I would brainstorm different ways to express anger or arrogance or boredom and things like that. And I made myself these cheat sheets just so that if I… As I was going, I’d write my scene and then I’d be like, okay, I want to go back and pump up the scene of it, and that’d go through my list of prompts, and that would just get my memory and my inspiration going. So that’s why I created it initially for myself. And then once I became an editor and I was working with a lot of clients and I saw that they… It wasn’t just me, it was everybody. They’re all having the same issue. I’m seeing these same issues in almost every manuscript I’m editing, so that’s why I expanded the toolkit. So it’s It’s a mini-course, but it includes a 100-page PDF, and it talks about nonverbal communication, what is body language, and gives a lot of examples. And then it’s broken down by category. So there’s different categories like anger and arguments, annoyance and frustration, compassion, confidence, contemplation. I’m reading some from the table; excitement, fear, happiness. And it’s just different ways to express those emotions. So you can just copy and paste some of the prompts, but I encourage you to use it as inspiration just to get your brain thinking of like, oh, okay, I could say it that way, or I could say it this way. It just gets your brain thinking. It’s like, it has you focusing on this. This is what I want to show. I want to show she’s embarrassed. I want to show he’s afraid. But instead of just when you’re writing or you’re editing, you’re sounding like, Okay, I want to show he’s afraid, but how can I… I’m getting a little stuck. I can’t think. You referred to the pages on fear, and it’s broken down into different ways. Some of the gestures, like touch, facial expressions, eyes and eye contact, different ways you can show fear through those kinds of emotional prompts. It just gets your mind… It just gets you focused on that. And then it can make it easier. A lot of people instead just refer to it all the time because they don’t have to remember all the common reaction or lying, or if somebody’s feeling relieved, I have pages on that. They don’t have to remember all the ways that the little tells that people might have if they’re lying, that they can just look at this and be like, oh, yeah, they might do that or do this. And how can I maybe put that into context? Use some of the details of my scene and setting? And how can I even put a pressure spin on that? So that’s basically what it is. And then I have some videos that shows how to use it and then a lot of different bonuses, like tweet sheets on developing your character and a little color wheels that have the different emotional categories. So you can keep it near you as you’re writing just to jog your memory so you don’t have to remember all the different categories of number of communication.
Kat
Right. And remember how many different emotions humans have. Sometimes it gets happy, sad, angry. I don’t know. And remembering that they are, they’re supposed to be emotional, right? So that sometimes I write a scene, I’m like, What is their emotion in this scene? Maybe we should go back and put an actual emotion in. Yeah, sure. Sometimes we can just be like, okay, you know, flatline, but probably not a whole book. That’s probably not good.
Stacy
I encourage, even though it’s like a reference book, I encourage people, I have on the left side of every page with the prompts, I list the different prompts and the different subcategories for that emotion. But on the right side, it’s blank lines. So I encourage people to print it out, put it in a binder or something, and then add to it. You know, if you’re reading a book and you saw a really fresh way somebody describes something, write it down. And not that you’re going to use that or copy it, but just like, oh, it’s just for inspiration. Just to increase your awareness of all the creative ways you can have your characters express these emotions and show how they’re feeling. Or sit down and one day, just sit down and brainstorm, okay, this is Stacy’s list for showing romance and showing chemistry between people. Let me brainstorm a list of my own, and I’ll write it. And that way, you just have it. It’s just you’re always adding to it. And then you’ll just have this great reference thing that you can pull out as you’re editing or if you’re stuck on a scene and it just becomes your own.
Kat
You don’t go to Google rabbit hole.
Stacy
You just make it your own. This is going to be a good starting point with a lot of… I think I have more than 4,000 prompts. I’ll give you a good starting point, but now you make it your own, you add to it. And then some emotions might be harder for you to show than others. You might be a romance writer and you’re great at writing the romance scenes and the romance and attraction, but you have trouble writing the argument scenes or something like that. So just becoming aware of what your strengths and weaknesses are and then trying to build that list. So it’s like a cheat sheet that you can.
Kat
Refer to. Go out and observe people. My favorite is to take a walk and listen to couples. That’s what I’m doing. And sometimes I’m like, Wow, they’re mad at each other. That’s the writer in me. And then it makes me think. I’m going to add that.
Stacy
Go write it. You’re going to go pull up my binder and I’m going to write what you do.
Kat
With my pen and paper, look at how she did that. I see that. But that’s great. I mean, this is what we’re trying to do, right? We’re trying to capture the human essence of different things, and we can’t hold everything in our head. I think a cheat sheet is great because it helps the writing go faster. A, I don’t want to go down the Google hole when I’m trying to write, and B, sometimes my brain just gets stuck. I need to pull this out of my binder and look at it. And it has helped me honestly to remember how many different emotions there are and to actually think when I pull out your cheat sheet, it’s like, okay, he’s afraid, but he’s actually not going to admit that he’s afraid. And so that might come out as shame. He’s ashamed of being afraid. And so how could I show… The reader is going to realize he’s probably afraid, but what’s his personality? And so I look over that and that might take me five minutes instead of going down the Google rabbit hole, it takes me three hours. And then it’s like, okay. And it really does when you’re still thinking about your story. So you’re not outside of your story anymore. You’re still thinking about your characters. I find that I then can get out 500,000 words no problem, because I haven’t left that story. I haven’t gone down, oh, look at this new disease they have on the sideline of the Google thesaurus that I’m looking at. So it won’t take you out of the story is what I’m trying to say. When you pull out these cheat sheets, it’s still part of writing. It’s still part of that process, right? You’re editing and you’re in it and you’re just getting deeper. It’s just all part of learning to become a better writer.
Stacy
Right. Just helping you to focus on this area more. And even it sounds like a small thing, like a nonverbal communication and body language, but it really makes you think about the bigger thing is why are they doing that? And help you just flesh out your characters and make sure that you understand their motivations. And then, okay, so that’s why they’re acting like this way. And this is how some ways I can show it on the page to the reader.
Kat
Yes, I love that. So we’re going to have the links in the show notes below as well as links to finding all things about Stacy Juba and her courses. And thank you so much, Stacy, for coming and talking to us today about nonverbal communication.
Stacy
Thank you. Always a pleasure talking to you.