How to Write Nonverbal Communication
During a class about dialogue mechanics, one of my students asked if I’d ever heard of FAD — feeling, action, dialogue. They’d read about it and they were trying to use it. And it was making them crazy.
I hadn’t ever heard of it, so I Googled right then and there. And I could immediately see the problem.
FAD is not talking about sentence or paragraph structure. You do not want every single paragraph to name a feeling, then an action, then have dialogue.
Can you imagine?
She was upset. She wiped her eyes. “Where are we going?”
He had empathy for her, so he handed her a tissue. “Home.”
Oof. No.
It’s clear that she’s crying — pretty much every reader will know that crying means upset. And he’s handing her a tissue, which is an empathetic response.
There’s not enough here to know whether or not ‘home’ is what she wants to hear. So he could have empathy, but is still taking her home. That might be true if she’s, say, his runaway teenage daughter. He could also be giving up something he wants in order to take her home. For…
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