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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26700
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26700
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

If you read with attention you will realize that there is very little of this in fiction. Actors can display all kinds of things with facial expression, which is why a script has to leave the actor room to work. But prose does not work that way. If you want a reader to know how a character is reacting to something they hear, you have basically three ways of doing it:

- Tell the reader directly. There is a long and honorable tradition of this in literature ancient and modern. It is the author's privilege to know these things and to report them directly if this is the best way to move the story forward.

- Express their feelings through their dialogue. Dialogue is not speech. Much is said in dialogue that is expressed in other ways in natural speech. Fictional dialog carries the burden that is carried by speech and action together in life or on the screen. 

- Set things up so that the reader will automatically know how the character is going to react as soon as they hear the words spoken to them. As in life, an engaged reader anticipates how someone will react to things and gets there at the same time they do, if not before. Much of the effect of fiction is achieved through the right setup. 

Detailed descriptions of facial expressions are not going to work for most readers. They have to spend too much effort to reconstruct the emotion being hinted at by the expression. Prose and screen are fundamentally different media and they achieve their effects in fundamentally different ways.

Original score: 6