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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/45638
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/45638
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I'm a professional scientist; my point of view might help. The only way I can think of is to approach it analytically. Body language is a **language** you don't know. There are books on it, some contradictory (giving you freedom to choose). The parts you are missing is that instead of understanding the language and becoming fluent (on paper), you are trying to translate one word at a time using a cross-language dictionary. surprise=X. Anger=Y. But of course you know people express surprise, anger, boredom and excitement in many ways. You need to become more fluent in the language than just consulting a Spanish-English dictionary one word at a time.

I like and suggest evolutionary psychology, as well. Emotions in animals and in humans serve a purpose, each one of them, that has (on average) contributed to the survival of each species. Understanding how and why we express various emotions helps you determine when, where and how emotion needs to be injected.

I suggest re-reading some best sellers you personally enjoyed, but in analysis mode. Catalog the ways that author described body language and **_why_** , at that moment, it was needed. What was the character feeling?

Sometimes the character wasn't feeling anything particularly strong. Action can be used for no other purpose than breaking up blocks of dialogue, to keep the reader's mental image of the scene from fading. We need to remind the reader that this happening in a place to people! That is one valid purpose of describing body language.

But also, people sigh in frustration, or boredom. It oxygenates the brain, to think harder or just stay conscious.

Parse the book and look for body language. The first step of science is typically _classification_ or categorization if you prefer: grouping similar things together. That is the first step toward _generalization_. The next step is finding relationships between the groups. What do exultation and anger have in common? Or depression and anger? Anger can be related to both "victory" and "defeat", like exultation and depression. Tears may be expressed in anger, that is because the anger is sometimes accompanied by defeat. Tears may be an expression of surrender; people often cry when they reach a point of accepting that they have lost something they wanted, or been beaten. And crying comes in degrees; from wiping a tear away to full voice sobbing.

You can become more fluent in body language, getting past the "substitution" phase, by studying it for yourself. I've never experienced being a dog, but I have owned and trained dogs my whole life, and I have a pretty good idea of how they think and feel.

You can do that with literature. See where body language is used, what emotion the character was experiencing, and the ways that emotion is being expressed. In best selling books you yourself enjoy. Not to plagiarize them, but to generalize your own understanding of how emotions get expressed bodily, with those body parts, so you can then go from the general to original specific prose.

Original score: 20