Alien body language

How many of you have ever read anything like, "then the alien waved its tentacles at me"?

Last week I put up this link here, about body language. If you saw the original post, I put up a caveat about the fact that body language differs across cultures. Well, after thinking about it for a week I had to revisit the question.

This list goes through and gives very specific meanings for a lot of body language cues - in the head, eyes, upper body, and lower body. Here's a great example:

• Failing to look someone in the eyes displays a lack of confidence.
• Lowering the eyes is a sign of submission, fear or guilt.
• Staring is interpreted as aggression and implies a person feels dominant and powerful.
• Looking directly into another person’s eyes without staring signifies self-assurance.

This is what we, as Americans, typically interpret from eye contact body language. However, it is not at all universal. In many cultures, including Japan, looking into the eyes directly is interpreted as a similar message to staring. Failing to look someone in the eyes is a sign of respect. Note that it can be interpreted as submission, but submission with none of the negative connotations you see in the American association of submission with fear or guilt.

We are taught these things through both immersive experience and instruction when we are very young. Some kinds of gestures can be interpreted as specific, intentional messages while others are more subtle and sent subconsciously.

So, as to the question of alien body language, how should we approach it?

First, the approach to alien body language will depend on whether you are treating your aliens as strange and incomprehensible outsiders, or as friends, or from the insider's point of view. You'll have to do less work if you're going the "strange and incomprehensible outsiders" route, but I would still encourage you to think through a few things.

1. Consider the alien's physiology. What are the regions of the body which can most easily be employed for body language, through motions of various sorts?
2. Once you've identified those body regions, ask how those motions can be systematized. What kind of motions would be considered specific messages, deliberately sent? What kind would be more subconscious? A human watching body language on the part of the alien might be better at interpreting subconscious cues than specific messages, because of the way specific messages are typically taught.

Now, if you're going with the aliens as friends, or taking the insider's route, it's important to go into more depth. Unless you're designing an alien with an entirely different philosophy of communication, you'll find that communication travels through multiple channels (verbal and physical) and is highly redundant. If you look at descriptions of human interaction, you'll find that the interpretation of body language is very important. If you don't pursue the question of body language for your aliens, you'll be missing out on a great opportunity, and people may indeed miss it.

As you write the story, look for places where a human in the same situation might make a gesture of one kind or another. Consider whether the message your alien is sending is one that is common or important enough to warrant a specific-message type gesture. If so, consider how that message might be delivered. When you are using an alien that resembles an earth creature, particularly an earth mammal, it's good to go with familiar gestures that fit the physiological type (particularly for the subconscious ones). But be creative! And be creative especially with the iconic, specific-message gestures, because those are the ones that depend most completely on culture and instruction. Remember, for example, that beckoning (which seems at first glance to be a highly universal signal) is executed very differently in the West and Japan, so much so that if you are a Westerner you may think you're being shooed away. And this with precisely the same physiology.

Think about the body language system. Integrate physiology with culturally accepted messages. Think through how those would be expressed, and then think through how that code will be interpreted by a human outsider.

You could come up with some really interesting results.

Body Language: eye gaze (in life and animation)

Eyes are important. You remember all those scenes where the bad guy is questioning a child, trying to find people who have hidden, watching the kid's eyes to see if they flicker off in any direction to indicate the location of the hiding place. You probably also remember that the character Violet's first line in The Incredibles is, "He looked at me." In real life, and in the movies, we're constantly watching people's eyes - characters' eyes - to learn things about what they are thinking and feeling.

Just because you're working in words - writing a story rather than a movie - doesn't mean you should ignore the power of eye gaze. It's one of the most important non-verbal cues that we watch for, and if it's missing, readers will sense a huge gap in your story.

Eye gaze is an excellent tool for reinforcing point of view. To me there's a wonderful contrast between talking about the things seen by the POV character - where I explicitly try to avoid saying "I saw" - and giving descriptions of the way that a non-POV character's eyes move. In this context, having your pov character "look" makes it a conscious gesture of the eyes. Here's an impromptu example:

I turned. Josephine was standing in the doorway. (1) When I looked at her (2), she dropped her gaze away (3).

1. POV character's observation, no mention of "seeing"
2. POV character makes a deliberate eye gesture: placing gaze on Josephine.
3. POV character observes movement of Josephine's eyes, which suggests an emotional state.

We are taught throughout life to manage our eye gaze. "Look at me when I'm talking to you!" "How dare you give me that look?" "As you speak, make sure you're looking out across the crowd and making eye contact with individuals." Because of this, we form expectations about what different eye gaze positions and styles mean, and those expectations can help you in your story. Talking about eye movements or what someone is looking at is a great way to externalize one character's assessment of another character. It's also a great way to "show don't tell."

Different cultures place different value on eye gaze. I had a friend once who was having a period of difficulty with job interviews, and someone else suspected that his style of making eye contact might be at fault. In my local culture, students in school are expected to make eye contact with teachers as a way of indicating that they're paying attention. In other cultures (such as Japanese or Native American), making eye contact with a teacher is considered inappropriate and presumptuous, possibly an affront. If you're working with an alien group or an alternate world, keep this in mind, because it can give you lots of opportunities for creating difference and possible misunderstanding.

Because I like this stuff, I've created a special instance of eye gaze that I'd like to share from my own work. The Imbati servant caste of Varin has a special set of "gaze-gesture codes" that manservants use in order to communicate when speaking is not appropriate (for example, when their masters are speaking and they can't interrupt). It's not a language, and not universal to the caste, since it's taught explicitly to the elite manservant group. However, the most basic gaze gestures are known to most Imbati and can be used in place of speech whenever they would like to use them. Some examples are "permission," "apology," "request," etc.

Recently I've noticed a sort of common gaze language - or more accurately, eye language - emerging from the portrayal of eyes in animated films. Both Pixar and Dreamworks make use of what I call the "shrinking eye." When characters are shocked or frightened, their pupils shrink down to tiny dots. When Toothless the dragon is angry and ready to pounce, his pupils are small; when he's friendly, they're large.

In fact, this is contrary to my observations of nature. I used to play a game with my cat Folly. I'd stare her down and try to get her to pounce at me by using nothing more than my eye gaze. I could always tell when she was about to pounce because her pupils would abruptly expand. Expand - they'd get so big I could scarcely see her irises, and a split second later, she'd jump.

I've asked myself why in the world the shrinking eye would be so effective at conveying fear or shock, and I've come to this conclusion: pupil size is only one indicator of shock. The wideness of the eyes is another major indicator - probably even a more obvious one. When an animated character experiences shrinking eye, not only the pupils but the irises get smaller, leading to a significant expansion in the white of the eye. By using the shrinking eye, the animators are able to convey an extreme widening of the eye without having to have the eyes expand and take over the head (as they, and mouths, do quite often in anime-style animation). In the case of Toothless the Dragon, the pupil not only expanded but distorted, becoming less oval and more square. The result was an optical illusion that made his eyes look more round - more cute - without requiring the animators to change the shape of the eye and create a weird distortion effect on the dragon's face.

I wonder if you've noticed this trend in animated movies, as I have... I hope the commonness of these effects doesn't lead to them becoming the accepted method. Too much uniformity detracts from creativity, in my mind.

Anyway, try spending some time concentrating on how people use their eyes. It could give you some ideas for your latest story.

Body language: are there clichés?

Recently on the Absolute Write forum I encountered a really good question about body language. In the midst of discussion on another topic entirely one writer asked whether there were any "good gestures" or whether all gestures were "clichéd, like smiling and shrugging".

I'd never thought about it this way, even though I've discussed body language before (here and on other forums). Would a gesture be cliché? Or would it only be the way the gesture was handled in written form?

I'll start with the second question, and then go back to the first. Anything we write can turn out badly if we handle it wrong, and if an author chose to use the same gesture too many times in close succession, that could definitely look repetitive. It would be a problem, but a problem of the writing. There are possible "show don't tell" issues surrounding gestures as well. There might be times when a more detailed description of a character's body movements is more appropriate than simple use of the word "shrugged." If you're writing along and you come to a point where a person has to show discomfort in their body language, there are many ways you can choose to have them do it - scratching an ear, shuffling feet, looking away, etc. - so you can make a conscious choice to have that behavior fit the character's personality or the formality of the context. For example, at a formal dinner party, a person might simply look away from the person he/she is talking to without showing any other physical signs of discomfort. Making good choices in such contexts is part of creating a successful story. By all means, don't say "he furrowed his brow" every single time someone has to express disapproval.

What about the question of whether gestures themselves can be cliché? My immediate instinct is to say no, they can't. Mind you, they can be repetitive. Body language isn't verbal or grammatical, but it does have a "code." Some gestures are "fixed expressions," such as the shrug or the handshake. Other gestures have different interpretations depending on the context in which they appear - eye-widening can mean surprise, fear, amazement, or exasperation, and we have to look at how it is described and what is happening or being said around it in order to understand its meaning. It's interesting to consider that sometimes we have different words to differentiate between these contexts - for example, "glaring" for the exasperated eye-widening, and "staring" for at least two of the other contexts. Smiling is another physical cue that can mean joy, evil pleasure, or nervousness depending on where it appears.

Many gestural cues vary across cultures - something to keep an eye out for. In Japan people point to their own noses while saying "Me?" rather than their chests; they point with the whole hand and not with just one finger; they beckon with the palm facing down, not up. These are the kinds of things one can vary when dealing with fantasy societies or aliens, and one can even exploit misunderstandings in gesture for critical plot moments.

Body language is extremely useful to a writer. It can and should be used. Because I usually write in very tight points of view (first person or tight third person), I find body language very useful. I use emotional description or internalization for the point of view character, and descriptions of body language and facial expressions for other characters in the scene (along with the pov character's judgment of their meaning). Here's an example:

[Tagret] risked a glance and caught Fernar gaping in horror, Della's Yoral in what could only be called a valiant effort not to look - something. Amused, hopefully, rather than insulted.

This allows you to create a solid sensation of point of view and keep your characters differentiated (even when they aren't speaking!).

So if you feel at this point that you may have a shorter list of body language tools than you would like to have, I'll give you a short list of possible body language cue types and what they may be useful for. Of course, there's no way to cover everything!

• The direction someone is facing - good for first impressions of a person's mood, where their attention is focused, and how safe they feel
• Where a person is looking (making eye contact or looking at a particular object) - good for showing what a character is paying attention to, and how ready they are for conversation or confrontation.
• Open or closed body posture - this shows mood and receptiveness. The more bunched up a person is, the more uncomfortable they appear (like my poor daughter at the dentist's yesterday!). A person can also close body to one side and open to another by crossing the legs and turning the shoulders, perhaps to show preference to one love interest over another.
• Placement of the hands - this shows mood, anxiety level, and can also give information about character and personality depending on what the person is holding or what they are doing with their hands.
• Height of the shoulders - another mood indicator
• Ease of breathing - great to show fear, relief, relaxation, excitement, etc.

This is just a short list, as I said, to get you started. One great thing to do is go out with your anthropologist's glasses on, set yourself in a public place and watch how people move. Figure out what your instincts tell you about certain body postures. Then you can enrich your own list of body language cues and work on incorporating these into your writing. It's the best way I can think of to avoid the problem of a body language cliché.

Body Language: Head Posture

I just noticed something the other day. My daughter recently received a Disney Princesses art set for her birthday (she loves art) and one of its elements is a ruler with pictures of six princesses, side by side.

Not one of the princesses is holding her head up straight. The closest to it is probably Cinderella, but even she has her head inclined slightly forward. Forward, or back, or to the side, they're all giving me some sort of come-hither look.

As a mother and a believer in gender equity, I must say: Argh!

Mind you, it's a funny thing. I'm having some art created for an author website right now, by wonderful artist Jared Fiori, and of all the characters who appear in it, only one has his head up perfectly straight - Xinta, servant to the Eminence Nekantor. Even Nekantor himself doesn't hold his head up straight. And I wouldn't ask Jared to change any of it.

What is conveyed by head posture?

Confidence, I'd say - that goes with the straight head. Claims for dominance can be partly expressed in straight head posture, and stances expressing submission go with the forward-tilted head. The side-tilted head posture is one I associate with coquettishness.

There's another factor in portrait drawing (or photos), which is that a person's stance seems more dynamic if their head isn't straight up and down. However, looking slightly to the side or slightly up doesn't have the same effect as that head tilt. A professional photographer friend of mine - Chris Jackson, who took the portrait for my blog - told me that for photos of company officers, the photos don't look right unless the person is leaning forward toward the camera. That has to me another message - perhaps one of determination and seriousness that people like to see associated with the leaders of their favorite companies.

The topic of body language is larger than this, of course, and perhaps I should come back to it. Until then, be aware of head postures as an indicator of mood in the description of your characters in their interactions - and ask yourself how head posture habits might differ if you're working with aliens...

Now, this is marvelous!

Here's a wonderful blog entry about drawing portraits of great apes - gorillas and chimpanzees. The portraits are wonderful, but what makes me laugh with delight is the way the artist has learned appropriate nonverbal behavior to be polite to these apes so they'll pose for the sketches.
Marvelous!

It's here.

It's touching...

Today's post starts with a story from the first time I lived in Japan. At the time I was going to the Kyoto Center for Japanese Studies, which was located behind the zoo. We had a joke about how it was an appropriate place for gaijin...

But anyway.

It was a wonderful school, and while I went there, I did two different homestays. The first one was what I would call sub-optimal - but how was I to know? I soldiered on for quite a long while, believing that my dissatisfaction must be caused by cultural intolerance, until I realized there were really some substantive issues there (like not being given a heater and waking up to find the temperature at 3 degrees C in my room) and switched homestays.

This is not so much about them, as about how I felt about a month in. I got depressed, and I couldn't figure out what I was missing until one day I walked into school and saw one of my friends and said,

"Please give me a hug!"

I can't tell you how much better I felt after that. I'd gone for about a month with nobody touching me at all. It made me terribly lonely.

Touching is one of those things that varies widely across cultures. I remember seeing a show once about an African group of people who engaged in constant social touching, and finding this to be very interesting (but not particularly appealing). On the other hand, I love giving hugs to my friends, and I missed it very deeply for my first few weeks in Japan (before I knew my classmates too well).

In high school I remember there were marked and unmarked forms of touching. Shoulder massage was considered flirtatious but didn't "mean" anything; hugs were safe with just about anyone; holding hands was something you never did except with that someone special.

This is a place where you can really create nuance and social meaning for the purposes of your world. It's not a binary "we touch" or "we don't touch" kind of thing. It can be "this kind of touch is safe," "this kind of touch is awful," "this kind of touch is sweet" - or embarrassing, or not to be done on penalty of death, etc. My only suggestion would be not to make it random. There are always reasons for the consequences of different kinds of touch: social messages like those of male-female bonding, or taboos associated with parts of the body or particular types of activities (for example, a certain type of touch might only be permitted when in mourning etc.).

As you create your society, think through the rules of touch, and you'll find you can send many more messages about your world than you could without them.

Are you being invaded?

Have you ever had one of those conversations where you're being chased? The other person takes one step too close to you, and you step back, and they step forward, and before you know it, the race is on?

This is one of the difficulties that can arise from different concepts of personal space.

It's not a visible, but an invisible line between people, and when someone crosses it, you know. Not everyone's invisible borderline lies in the same place - and not every borderline stays in the same place all the time.

In Japan, typically people maintain a borderline that is further from them than ours here in the US. It's very practical. If you're both going to be bowing, and potentially bowing all the way to the horizontal, you have to take that into account when deciding where to stand, or you could sustain a head injury! So I guess it's okay to stand closer to someone when you're of about the same status and you won't have to bow low, but standing further away might be best with someone much older or of higher social status.

The one that always surprised and amazed me in Japan was the way the personal space borderline moves. If you're in a work or home situation, in a place where established social relationships exist around you and must be maintained, then the borderline falls at a distance. But if you're walking the Tokyo streets or traveling the subways with strangers, the borderline moves inward - to the skin. I was always amazed at how people in Tokyo would walk straight through me, constantly jostle and bump and never seem to notice they had done it.

To sensitive little American me it felt like a constant assault, and somehow I could never entirely turn it off, even after I got used to it. When I had just gotten back to California a woman in the supermarket apologized to me and at first I couldn't figure out why. Then I realized she was apologizing because the invisible path in front of her cart had accidentally entered the invisible path in front of mine.

I was tempted to give this woman a hug for being so considerate - but I wouldn't have wanted to invade her personal space. :-)

Interesting Links

This last week hit hard after our return from Chicago, and I'm having to rethink my blogging schedule temporarily. I've decided to start posting at the bottom of each entry the ideas I've had for upcoming posts, so that anyone who wants to share thoughts in advance, and potentially influence my post content, can feel free to do so. So look at the bottom of this entry for the first peek ahead.

Today I thought I'd put up a few interesting links, for anyone who's interested.

There's a discussion of body language on the Analog forum, and Tom Ligon mentioned a scientific approach to describing how the human body moves and gestures, called Laban Movement Analysis. You can read more on wikipedia or there's an official program site at http://www.labancan.org/index.htm

Also in that discussion Greg Ellis mentioned finding an online source about nonverbal gestures: http://members.aol.com/nonverbal2/diction1.htm
This one has some very interesting gesture-by-gesture descriptions, photos and examples from popular culture (such as quotes from Shakespeare and actors who favor a gesture).

I read an article recently about English spelling, but lost track of it and haven't quite been able to find it again, so anyone who's interested can check out this page, which contains some interesting information about historical elements preserved in spelling: http://www.nyu.edu/classes/copyXediting/Spelling.html

And of course if anyone knows of the article mentioned above, please remind me!

The last link is to a great resource about the nature of elements - a hard science topic, not a language/culture one, but still reflects on what the internet can do for making science accessible and enjoyable!

http://www.periodicvideos.com/#

Upcoming topics at TTYU: gender, swearing

Don't forget the importance of body language

After yesterday's post I've been presented with a number of interesting language systems to chew on - but it's going to take me more than a single day to come back with ideas! One of the things that came up peripherally, though, is the question of body language. So I thought I'd muse a bit on it this evening.

I won't discuss sign languages here, except to say that they are fully elaborated language systems with their own complex layers of grammar, all executed in the visual medium using signs in combination with posture and facial expression.

Body language is something every writer should take time to observe, because it's useful in every genre. It's great for the purposes of "show not tell" to express characters' emotional states. Closed body position is a classic indicator of discomfort, and can include crossed legs, crossed arms, tucked chin, hiding of hands, and lack of eye contact. Open body position, the opposite, indicates comfort, and if taken to the extreme, can indicate attraction. Personal distance is also a really great thing to observe and to use in stories, and can be used along with general body position.

If you really want to take the idea of investigating body language seriously, try carrying a notebook to a place where lots of human interaction is taking place, and making note of the different types of body stances, hand gestures, head angles, gaze gestures, and facial expressions that you see.

Basic facial expressions are common across cultures - things like fear, anger, happiness, etc. But gestural signals and personal boundaries vary.

Here are some real-world examples from my experience. Americans tend to stand at hand-shake distance, while Japanese people stand further away, at bowing distance. I have watched people conk heads (ouch!) when the standards cross. Americans will point to their hearts when saying "I," while Japanese people will point to their noses. The Japanese gesture for "come here" is executed with the wrist above and the fingers below, with the back of the hand facing the person being called - almost exactly like the American gesture for "move a little further off." My husband nearly got lost in Tokyo because of this distinction. I have seen many Europeans point using their middle fingers, where Americans point with their index fingers. The Japanese generally with their entire hands, and consider the single-finger point to be rude - though it doesn't have a meaning anything like the middle finger in America!

Oh, what lovely potential for misunderstanding there is in gestural communication! Gestures tend to be iconic, which is to say that their meanings seem obvious to those using them. However, as I've noted above, not everyone agrees on the same obvious meaning.

Alternate physiology (aliens!) only adds to the possibilities. Consider the vast difference between human and canine gestural language. A human might point to his mouth or stomach to indicate hunger, while a puppy has the instinct to lick its parent's chin. I've found that learning a bit about dogs' gestural communication has further widened the parameters I feel I can play with in gesture, including head position, body posture, tongue gestures, bites, etc.

If you want to think about how to make an alien look inquisitive, think about what kind of sensory organs it might be using to investigate things, and work from there. Cocking the head to get the eyes closer to the person they're talking to might work. Or swiveling their ears forward. Or raising their antennae higher. Try to think about it from the point of view of their communication needs (and if you're feeling ambitious, the social significance of gestural communication), and the possibilities will start to open up.