Essential information in a conversation is often conveyed silently, by a gesture or other body language.

Drawing inspiration from diverse and idiosyncratic sources, use your characters' physicality to create a vivid, non-stereotyped physical presence for your characters. This could include gesture, posture, gait, or tics. It is important to veer away from clichéed or familiar descriptions. For now, focus on gait, the way a character walks.

1. My dog is a slim, short-haired rescue with a ginger-blonde coat and an up-curled tail. He's a supermutt, meaning there are so many breeds in him, you can't distinguish them. He reminds a lot of people of the dog emoji on their cell phones. That description will give you a good idea of his looks, but it's problematic, because Otto seen this way is just a visual cliché — exactly what to avoid in writing. Otto is also useful for this reflection precisely because he's a very average dog. He is a subject, like the fat cook or the sweet little old lady, who is likely to be rendered in a stereotypical manner. He also can't talk, and I don't have a great deal of access to his inner life, so he's a subject who must be rendered through external observation of his body language and gesture. To make Otto unique, visually, I need to tell the reader something unusual about this very basic hound. I find it in his walk. When Otto is feeling confident, he saunters with a swivel in his hips. For all his lack of pedigree, it makes him seem quite fancy, that runway model's walk — not to mention his dark-rimmed tawny eyes that evoke Nefertiti's.

2. In Helen Schulman's novel The Revisionist, her character Hershleder decides to indulge himself by going to see a movie after work and then stopping in at the Oyster Bar for some briny aphrodesia and cocktails before hitting the commuter rail to go home. In the "cool stone vagina" of a Grand Central tunnel, he nearly steps in a pile of excrement, which presages the shitstorm to come for Hersleder. The moment when he avoids stepping in the shit is striking and original: "The passageway smelled like a pet store. The horrible inevitable decay of everything biological, the waste, the waste! Hershleder did a little shocked pas de bourrée over a pretzel of human shit, three toe-steps, as lacy as a dancer’s." The dichotomy of the dance step and the shit create enormous energy and humor here. And somehow they also give the fairly egregious Hershleder a likeability boost as well.

3. Disorders of gait. When my husband was in medical school, there was one lecture that was so popular that he invited me to attend it. The professor who taught disorders of gait -- the diagnosis of neurological conditions through observing a patient's manner of walking — was wonderful and funny. One of the things I took away was how much we express pathology through our bodies. Imagine that each of us has a disorder which is the culmination of everything that's happened in their life.

PROMPT: Without dwelling on physical description, write a new scene where your character does some activity involving physical movement in a space that is important to the coming action. The idea is to focus on the action not the actor. Your action may be a small scale motion that you zero in on, and it may seem minor in importance at first, but keep focus on the movement itself and make it lead into bigger part of the story. The dynamism will help grab your readers attention. Zero in on a single body part or some typical movement such as arm swinging, foot dragging, a jaunty or arrogant stance, slouching. Being mindful of the vocabulary you choose to describe it, and making sure that it matches the tone you want to set, let character emerge from gait or stance.