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Another book review.

Unmasking the Face is part-text book, part-how to guide. I think one of the Amazon reviews describes it best: ‘A Must-Have Primer for Learning to Recognize Facial Expressions’. Unmasking the face demonstrates the science behind facial move and how emotion displays itself. No doubt useful for actors, salesmen, simiar professions, I’ve been finding it exceptionally useful for writing about character’s and how they react to events. There’s nothing quite as distracting as a character whose nose wrinkles in surprise, or brow furrows with happiness. Being able to describe ‘the white sclera of the eye made visible by the brow tense with fear’ makes all the difference.

Cheers!

Duchenne Smile

According to Wikipedia:

A Duchenne smile contracts the zygomatic muscles of the cheek and eye, forming crow’s feet. The crow’s feet indicate that the smile is genuine and that the smiler is truly happy. It was discovered by and is named after Guillaume Duchenne.

After writing about prosody I spent an hour or so running around esciencenews.com. There’s some great articles and tons of science. From a writing standpoints one article stuck out in particular. Smiles!

Skin bunched by the eyes, raised cheekbones, a slight squint, all signs of a genuine smile…and useful to write when you’re sick of ‘John Smiled’

If facial expressions say more than a 1000 words, than we can cut out a thousand words by writing about facial expressions, yes? Maybe not, but prosody…what a great word! Sometimes you read something and it just overflows with…well…prosody. Tapping into little things like facial expressions is a good way to furfill that arch-commandment of show, not tell.

Here’s another article explaining just how people respond to these little facial queues.

It’s important. It’s just a shame that it’s so hard. Writing is an art not a science, but editing is even more capricious. I’ve taken bad stories and edited them into something interesting, but I’ve taken rather clever stories and made them into dreck just the same. Editing is a difficult, time-consuming, and horribly subjective process that make or ruin any writing.

It may be subjective, but it’s not without rules. Below are a handful of websites with suggestions on editing. Some of them are well-known and fairly. (Less is more) Others are far more obscure. (Don’t norminalize your verbs).

10 Tips For Effective Editing

Improve Your Writing With These Editing Tips

How to Edit your Own Writing

And a few tips of my own:

Change the font on your manuscript so it looks different: It helps you read writing you are already intimately familiar without filling in the gaps with what you remember.

Reverse Outline: Go through a story or chapter and create an outline of the major points. Match this to your original outline to see if you said more or less than what you intended.

Keep Revisions: Keep saved versions of older edits. Feel free to tear your writing apart since you can always look back at what you had.

Good luck!