Writing resource #4

Today, I'll talk about Face Turn.

Face turn

Face Turn is another amazing resource for showing emotions in your writing. It helps prevent telling the reader what the POV is felling and having those pesky POV slips when you tell the reader what a non POV is feeling. It also allows you to show how the character feels/reacts to what someone else says or how the fell about what they are saying. It gives you a good 'blocking' tag to go along with the body language tags and action tags. Doing all this helps you avoid dropping said and asked on every line. (And it doesn't involve using the dreaded said-book-isms)

With Face Turn, I often go over it before I start writing. Try to get a feel for the total emotions I want to convey for a scene and then look at the different faces expressing those feelings. Sometimes, I will try and imitate those expressions ... while at home ... alone—sometimes there is a mirror, sometimes just my hands feeling the contours of my own face. This gives me a good idea of the twitches I'll write for the characters when I dive into a chapter/edit.

Sometimes, I use it like Word Hippo or the Body Language Cheat Sheet, and {   } an emotion + the word facial expression/body language. Then when I go back to clean up the chapter, I pull up Face Turn and go through the emotion, zooming in and gauging each contour of the face. Then, I imitate it and decide which twitch I want to insert into my writing so that it doesn't break the flow.

This resource allows me to expand my ability to show a reader what my characters are feeling, rather than telling them. I hope you give it a chance and see if it helps expand your writing.

Thanks for reading,
Travis

Next: One page synopsis