I have an eyebrow problem.

And a chin problem. And a problem with shrugging and sighing.

Don’t even get me started on hands and fists. Or (bane of my existence) eyes.

In my first drafts, my characters almost invariably cock their eyebrows, lift their chins, ball their fists, shrug, and stab one another with glares. All perfectly good gestures, and useful from time to time. But as often as I use them, you’d think none of my characters has a torso, or feet, or teeth. For long stretches, I end up with snappy dialogue between disembodied eyeballs.

I’m betting lots of writers have a similar stable of fall-back phrases—and as with any kind of cliché, they weaken writing. Even the most brilliantly-original, high-concept story can be killed by hackneyed language and stock repetitions.

So, lately, I’ve been making a conscious effort to get “fresh” with my writing.

Here’s what’s been helping for me:

1. Checking out Margie Lawson (margielawson.com)

After hearing others gush about how Margie enlivened their writing, I bought her lecture packets on “Empowering Characters Emotions” (the EDITS system) and “Deep Editing.” If you haven’t checked out Margie yet, hie thee to her website…after reading and commenting on this blog, of course.

Margie offers tons of great advice, but one of the best nuggets for me is that a LONGER phrase in place of a stock one may make all the difference. This goes against the whole “getting tight” thing I blogged about last month, but the trade-off is worth it.

The “basics” (as Margie calls phrases like “she shrugged” or “he balled his fists”) are fine from time to time, but to bring your story alive, you need to find thoughtful re-phrasings, specific to the character and scene and exact emotional meaning of the gesture.

While reading the lectures, I kept a notebook to jot down fresher phrasings that came to me:

Instead of “She shrugged”:

“Her shoulders jerked, as if throwing off the grip of invisible hands.”

Instead of “She straightened her spine”:

“Her spine went rigid enough to anchor a Greek temple.”

Instead of “He smirked”:

“The corners of his mouth tugged up in triumph.”

Instead of “Her pulse pounded”:

“Her pulse ticked and snapped, its normal steadiness lost.”

Instead of “His stare took her breath away”:

“He seemed to focus a strange heat on her, and her lungs half-melted, no longer able to draw in enough air.”

I don’t know if Margie would approve of those particular choices, but I like them better than the originals.

2. Thinking like a film director

After reading one of my disembodied-eyeball scenes, my beloved CP (who, not incidentally, has a theater background) told me, “This is all in close-up—faces and hands. Pull back a little. Use the space they’re in.”

Ah-hah! The scene took place in a Regency orangerie, and I hadn’t taken advantage of setting at all. The re-write interwove dialogue with the scent of orange blossoms, the reflections of the characters’ bodies in the glass walls, and palm fronds the (very tall) hero set swaying when he smacked them with his arm.

For a very rigid hero who suppresses a lot of anger, instead of my fall-backs “His jaw tightened” or “His lips compressed,” I could try “He ground his boot-heel into the gravel walk, as if there were something down there he was trying to kill.”

Settings provide physical props as well. In my current WIP, I had my frustrated heroine balling up her fists (yet again…poor girl, I’m going to give her arthritis). I looked around the physical space, and had her pace along the sideboard instead and pick up something random: “She slowed for a moment, snatched up one of the little silver spoons, and began twirling and worrying it absently with her fingers.” A little later, “She flung down the spoon. It struck the coffee urn with a clang.”  Not the most brilliant writing, perhaps, but at least it got me past fists.

3. Thinking like an actor

To freshen descriptions of emotion and movement, try acting out your scenes. Seriously—stand up, try the move.

Pay attention to your body. Inhabit it emotionally. What does it really feel like when you sigh, or when you ball your fists, or when you glare at someone? What are your knees doing when you act it out? Your elbows, your cheeks, your scalp, your toes? Your sense of balance? How does your breathing change? (Nota bene: If you’ve got a willing partner, this is extra fun to try with love scenes….)

Because I’m finding my own examples completely embarrassing, from here on I’ll quote some authors who strike me as impressively fresh.

In Courtney Milan’s novella “This Wicked Gift” (from the 2009 Christmas anthology The Heart of Christmas), the hero greets the heroine (who’s sweet on him). Here’s her physical response to hearing him say her name:

“Unremarkable words, but her toes curled in their slippers nonetheless. He spoke in a deep baritone, his voice as rich as the finest drinking chocolate. But what really made her palms tingle was a wild, indefinable something about his accent.” (p. 259)

Nice, huh? Toes and palms, with indirect reference to taste and sound. And she notices his accent, not his manly chest.  That’s fresh!

When Milan’s heroine follows the hero out into cold morning air, “her skin seemed to light with an incandescent glow against that mass of white fog” (p. 337).

And, in place of a stock “He sighed,” here’s a line in the hero’s POV: ““Oh?’ The word was all he could manage—one syllable, trying to breathe a world of distance between them” (p. 344).

Lovely!

Milan’s debut novel, Proof by Seduction, is getting major buzz, and I think the freshness of her style (not just her high-concept plot and edgy characters) is a big reason why.

4. Thinking like a poet

Helen Vendler, Harvard’s much-beloved teacher of poetry, says poets write about ordinary life—they just look at it with fresh and honest eyes. The “fresh” examples above fall into that category, but poets also know how to exploit metaphors and similes. Used sparingly, they’re a great way to add a fresh burst to a line.

There’s lots of freshness to love in Sherry Thomas’s terrific debut Private Arrangements (which was RITA-nominated as both Best First Book and Best Historical Romance), but the unabashed fun of her similes really makes me grin.

Here’s a tiny sampling:

An angry woman “decapitated all the orchids in her beloved greenhouse…as if she were reenacting a floral version of the French Revolution” (p. 21).

The hero remembers the heroine as “the naughty, cheeky young girl who used to send her fingers on feats of alpinism up his thighs” (27).

At another point, the hero admits to himself, “Napoleon wanted Russia less badly than he wanted to lie with her” (p.249).

Not stock choices, any of those those—and not “safe,” either. They risk throwing readers out of the story. (For John Donne fans out there, that last one’s got to count as a metaphysical conceit).  But for me, and for lots of other readers, those metaphors and similes are sheer delight. Private Arrangements never, ever phones it in. The whole book’s alive.

5. Thinking like Joanna Bourne

Those of you who know me well know about my mad writer-crush on Joanna Bourne (author of RITA-nominated The Spymaster’s Lady and RITA-winning My Lord and Spymaster).   As I was thinking about this post, she was foremost in my mind as an absolute goddess of “fresh.”

I thought I’d be peppering this post with quotes from her books, and it would have been easy. (I open Spymaster’s Lady randomly to pages 8 and 9, and find “He had the body of an acrobat, one of those slight, tightly constructed people,” and “The thought of water stabbed sour pinpricks in her mouth. She was so thirsty.”)

But pulling “fresh” out of Bourne’s books is like trying to pull one thread out of an elegantly-constructed spiderweb. Her work is fresh in endlessly layered ways, and it all interconnects. So, JUST GO READ HER BOOKS RIGHT NOW!!! It’ll do your writer-brain good.

What about you? What’s the freshest writing you’ve read lately?  How do you keep it fresh when you write?