How do you avoid smiling, head-bobbing characters?
Posting on a question about word frequency data, I read an excellent answer from @DPT about avoiding words that become so frequent, they're problematic. In a snippet of that answer, they wrote:
But, you end up with bobbing heads, smiling at each other, and it's neither realistic nor enjoyable to read about for very long.
It got me wondering whether my characters are head-bobbing, smiling marionettes. So, I analysed my own 106,000 word novel for the frequency of nods and smiles. I have 62 smiles and 28 nods.
Does that number make you think, 'Whoa there! Too many, man!'?
And how do you avoid it?
Because, I try to keep my writing plain and realistic. I don't want to start thesaurusing smile and substituting it for, 'She grinned.' 'He beamed.' 'She smirked.' And the same with nod. Because, when you change the word, you do slightly alter the meaning. A smirk isn't the same a smile.
Also, in real life, when someone says something agreeable, we smile and nod. That's what people do. We don't bow our heads or bob them, we just nod in acknowledgement.
And, if I substitute nods for dialogue, it rubs me, just slightly, in the wrong direction. Just as an example, take this scene I'm writing now. A friend meets my MC's husband for the first time. He's very charming towards her and he's a good looking guy. So, she says, 'He's a bit of alright.'
Having my MC say, 'Yes, he is.' or 'I know.' or 'Isn't he!' feels all wrong. Firstly, if someone said that to me about my husband, I'd just smile and nod. And secondly, my MC is p****d off with her husband right now. So, she just smiles and nods to be agreeable.
This is just an example, but attempts to make the point that changing the words or substituting dialogue, often doesn't work.
So, how do y'all handle your marionettes?
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I had a similar concern once when, having happened upon this image, I thought to check how often characters sighed in one of my manuscripts. It happened about 1.5 times per chapter, which I felt was excessive. My trick to fixing this was simple: visualise the scene as if it were part of TV show, imagine what the actors would be doing to bring the scene alive, and describe that instead of the sighing. This may sound like it just replaces one repeated thing with another, but it didn't because I realised every sigh meant something different. So does every nod, and every smile. In fact, the real reason to replace these repetitive descriptions isn't that it reduces repetition; it's that it shows the various things people think across the story much more insightfully.
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I'm a little wary of purely data-driven writing changes. Without reading your book, I can't say if 62 smiles is 3 smiles too many or 5 smiles too few. But in terms of a warning sign of possible deeper issues, the question I would ask is whether your characters are too agreeable.
Although having someone smile and nod when someone else hits on their husband might be realistic, we generally want characters in fiction to be more active and demonstrative than those in real life. In this situation, even if she doesn't take the (more entertaining, but probably overdramatic) route of causing a scene, I'd at least expect a grimace, or a "forced" smile, or her hand to tighten momentarily on her purse.
It's okay for her to fool the people at the party, but if she's really not OK with this --and why would she be? --then I feel we the audience should know that. Even if being passive and overly agreeable is a key part of her character, we should get at least a hint of the effort it takes. Ishiguro's Remains of the Day is basically an entire novel about someone whose job description includes smiling and nodding, and what it costs him inside.
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(FTR, 21 nods, 53 smiles, 95K. We're pretty close.)
I had a beta read on a few chapters and they said the word usage itself was fine. You may be fine.
A few ideas.
- Some nods can be qualified. A half nod, a tilted head considering then nodding. (see the quoted text at the bottom.) I have one character 'tip her head up as if to say 'I told you.' '
But some of my nods really were just action tags for dialog. Those are the problems. They've been deleted or changed. (To that point, they crept in through a variety of efforts to correct other issues, like playing with dialog tags!)
You might be able (if you want) to change your 'example nod' to a low chuckle. Or a knowing chuckle.
"He's a bit of alright, isn't he?"
She chuckled softly in response.
Here's another possibility:
"He's a bit of alright, isn't he?"
Her eyes lingered on him as he walked away. She smiled, and she nodded.
(see what I did there? :-) He's definitely a bit of alright.)
It's got to be balance, right? Too many furrowed brows can be balanced out by changing a few of them to frowns or creased eyes.
I like this reddit thread about the topic. Check that out. Perhaps as part of the process, find a simple action that each character has (like a tic, I guess?) and play with limiting the action to that character. That way, the nods do double duty, if they are limited to certain characters.
Here's a gem (edited) from the reddit thread:
If you pick up one of your favorite authors and start reading with a mind to this you are going to notice that every single time the book turns its eye to a character the descriptions used reinforce deep traits.
No character will ever nod.. They will tilt their head down in a half nod, jaw set. They will glance around as though trying to find an answer in the air around them, then look at your eyes and quickly give a shallow nod of acceptance, or whatever. But what you, and I, were doing was poor characterization - probably.
(And there's the actual answer, the actual heavy lifting, of going deeper, finding something more evocative about the scene, the interaction, and giving that specific instead of a smile or a nod.)
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This depends on your characters and story
If you have a happy fairy-tale story for young adults having a lot of smiling characters may be exactly what you want - a mostly happy world.
If, on the other hand, you are writing a gritty thriller where the main goal is to show the psychological trauma of police officers dealing with the most gruesome parts of human nature you definitely don't want someone smiling every other page.
Furthermore you might have a character who always smiles as a character trait. Maybe it's the nice guy who always helps out. Or the nice guy who is always smiling and turning into a horrible monster with a smile that shows way too many, way too sharp teeth. A smile that causes fear in everyone who sees it - for they know that it will be the last thing they will ever face in this world.
Going only by word count is basically always a bad idea. There are too many factors to consider with this. Of course it can give you an idea of what to look at - you know what you are writing and what your characters are doing right now. But we don't know what characters and what story you are writing. And how far they are in their story. Maybe you are writing a really long book of a couple thousand pages in the end and this is merely the starting point where the world is still okay and happy and bright - the time before chaos turns everything upside down and nobody would ever smile again, for the smile of a person will cause horrible abominations to arise from the depths of the abyss with their only intention being to wipe the smile off of your characters face.
They are making their victims listen to their eldritch speeches of how what they are doing is the best for everyone. Forcing them to nod - or be tortured. Though every nod and every half-smile will bring them closer to their untimely demise.
For they sinned. Smiling is only for the powerful. To smile is to show power. And power belongs to those who are from the other side.
Words can have vastly different meaning depending on their context and just because you have a smile every five pages doesn't mean that your characters are all happy. For you are the only one who can say whether it was a warm smile of gratitude or a dangerous smile of a wicked witch.
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