Did you know that besides posting random brain farts, I also do question-and-answer?  Neither did I! But apparently I do, as I just received a question, from Idylia:

Hey there, Bad Horse.

I'm a follower of yours and often an admirer of your blog posts on writing conventions, but I've recently come across something that's been bothering me a lot that I'm not sure how to remedy. Your name sprang to mind as someone I might be able to go to for advice/direction to advice, so here I am.

When I began writing I found I was able to churn out many thousands of words a day. Quickly, though, I became enraptured with ridding my writing of cliches like telling, unnecessary dialogue tags, etc as these things became apparent to me. The downside of this, though is that I've been learning a lot of what not to do with little guidance towards what to replace it with, and so I feel my writing as of late has become a bit too sterile.

The subject of my specific ire is body language. Body language was a very easy replacement for me to make in place of traditional 'telly' phrases and such, but I find now that it's become such a go-to for me that it's nearly all I ever sprinkle in the midst of my scenes, besides your average exposition.

I wanted to ask if this is something you've ever felt about writing, whether it be in your own writing or in pieces that you read. What other kind of goodstuff can I use to keep a scene interesting? Internal dialogue/thoughts are fine, but in scenes where lots of speaking is happening or I'm trying to do something tonal or stylistic with removing direct dialogue to the reader it's not something I can rely on. Many times when I'm very excited to be writing something, I use so much metaphorical language that editors or proofreaders will call my writing overdramatic or too purple.

Maybe this is something that I just need to generally use my creative brain to work through as I notice it, but I'd  much appreciate hearing your thoughts on it, if you have any.

Good question. I struggle with the same problem myself, often at the behest of Equestria Daily prereaders, some of whom may look for phrases like "Amazing,' she gushed" or "He looked anxiously down the street" and ask you to replace the "telling" verb or adverb with body language. But do this too much, and your characters jerk like spastic robots, and your narrator sounds like an alien anthropologist (I think that's GhostOfHeraclitus' phrase) taking notes.

The annotations of the climax of The Last Unicorn indicate that most human body language involves the arms and hands. If you're befuddled about body language, it would be easier to practice it in non-pony stories. Pony body language is hard! They don't have hands, we don't know for sure what they would do to indicate different emotions, and I doubt we have as precise a vocabulary for describing them. And sometimes, we know that horses do the opposite of what humans do to express some particular emotion--I forget the particulars, but I've had a couple of these pointed out to me--and then what do you do?

By body language, I mean descriptions of where body parts are or what they are doing: "He raised one eyebrow", "He shuddered." This is a bit of an etymological enterprise. I'm counting "shuddered" because the word "shudder" applies to describe the motion of inanimate objects, and when applied to animate objects, we imagine them making that same movement. "Her face reddened" is body language because it can be applied to any object ("the sky reddened").

Adverbs don't usually count, since "body language" is often what we are asked to replace adverbs with. But I'm tempted to count adverbs that could apply to inanimate objects as body language: "She threw the ball awkwardly" isn't body language; "She threw the ball jerkily" might be.

I'm less sure about "She shrugged her shoulders", because "shrugged" is a verb describing a stereotypical motion of an animate body, and nothing else.  "She blushed" is similarly a verb that takes only animate agents. If we count "she blushed", should we also count "she ran", "she hit the wall", and "she snuck past" as body language?

The criterion of the people who tell us to use body language seems to be specificity. Anything with multiple possible interpretations is not body language. "Her face reddened" is body language; "she blushed" might be; "she looked embarrassed" definitely isn't.

I don't count blocking (stage directions) as body language ("She stood by the door.") There are borderline cases where the blocking implies more ("She stood with her back to the wall" suggests being threatened, pressed, and tense).

The next part of the question is what to use instead of body language. The best thing to do is to look at some great stories, and see what they do. Hence the previous (and forthcoming) story passages with adverbs, body language, and other descriptive devices annotated.

The excerpt I posted a few days ago from Chapter 8 of The Last Unicorn is very visual and descriptive. Let's go through it and look for the body language:

He was the color of blood, not the springing blood of the heart but the blood that stirs under an old wound that never really healed. A terrible light poured from him like sweat, and his roar started landslides flowing into one another. His horns were as pale as scars.

That's straight description. Adjectives and similes.

For one moment the unicorn faced him, frozen as a wave about to break. Then the light of her horn went out, and she turned and fled. The Red Bull bellowed again, and leaped down after her.

Some action. Verbs, and another simile.

The unicorn had never been afraid of anything. She was immortal, but she could be killed: by a harpy, by a dragon or a chimera, by a stray arrow loosed at a squirrel. But dragons could only kill her - they could never make her forget what she was, or themselves forget that even dead she would still be more beautiful than they. The Red Bull did not know her, and yet she could feel that it was herself he sought, and no white mare. Fear blew her dark then, and she ran away, while the Bull's raging ignorance filled the sky and spilled over into the valley.

Now we deviate from literal description into a description of what she might be thinking and feeling. "Fear blew her dark" isn't the least bit literal, and neither is "the Bull's raging ignorance filled the sky". They're metaphors that describe her feeling and the source of his anger in physical terms.

Still no body language, though.

The trees lunged at her, and she veered wildly among them;

There it is! She's veering wildy... oh, wait, that's just a verb and an adverb.

she who slipped so softly through eternity without bumping into anything.

There — she's slipping softly... oops, that's just an adverb again. (You can't apply "slipped softly" to inanimate objects.)

... a great branch clubbed her on the shoulder so hard that she staggered and fell.

That's... no, still no body language; just precise verbs.

She was up immediately, but now roots humped under her feet as she ran, and others burrowed as busily as moles to cut across the path.

See, "burrowed as busily as moles"... wait, no, that's a verb followed by an adverbial phrase that makes a simile.

Vines struck at her like strangling snakes, creepers wove webs between the trees,

Two more similes.

This passage is full of similes and adverbs, but has no body language at all, despite having a good deal of action in it.

I'll try to post a few more annotated excerpts this month, looking at body language and other descriptive devices. Next up, "Torn Apart and Devoured by Lions" by Skywriter. If, OTOH, people are getting worn out by too darn many Bad Horse posts, I'll try to rein myself in for a bit.