Take, for instance, this wonderfully edited selection of scenes from the Twilight Saga movies. Compiled by the YouTube channel Screen Junkies — the channel that produces the ever-popular Honest Trailers series — the following clip contains about 26 minutes of Twilight characters staring at each other:

A drug for Hollywood directors, “meaningful stares” make it into nearly every Hollywood movie. These scene anchors often mean nothing to the viewer. They can sap a plot’s rhythm and insert unnecessary punctuation for more necessary dialogue and actual physical action.

But this is not just a Hollywood problem. This is a first draft problem. Too often in my own writing, I return to a scene and find it rife with boring action. “Jason looked at the parcel in Stef’s hand.” Or: “Williamson watched the leaves swirl away.” Or: “I studied the veins in her hand.”

A little bit of this kind of writing can be okay. Sometimes we, as authors, need to discretely communicate that a particular character noticed an event or visual characteristic somewhere. But more often than not, especially when writing from first person or third-person close, the readers intrinsically assume any descriptions are noticed or at least obvious to the main character or speaker.

So instead of describing “her hand,” I can more efficiently apply a verb to the description and keep the passage more efficient. “The veins in her hand throbbed blue.” Or even better, I could have those vivid hands performing a plot-pushing action: “The veins in her hand throbbed blue as she squeezed my throat.”

Now we’re talking! Which is more than Twilight did in those 26 minutes.

*Zing!*

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