Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

I was just thinking this while dealing with a “possessive gaze” that keeps “mingling anger and desire.”

Sarah - you are awesome!  That just needed to be said.

I so agree with you!

And here I was thinking I was wired wrong or something for not being able to read those emotions in the eyes of the people around me.  What were all these authors seeing that I cannot?!?  0_0

Problem solved.  Thanks Sarah!

It’s all in the eyebrows.

Can we stop with the flicker of fear, the fleeting hint of desire, the flash of rage? COME ON. Couldn’t a hero have tension between his eyebrows, a wrinkle near his eyes that indicated rage that smooths out before she gets a good look?

First, if 2012 is the year of “his eyebrows furrowed” it will totally be your fault.

And you picked an easy one. Rage has furrowing brows and tight jaws and big, throbbing veins in the forehead. Then you’ve got a few that come with the arching eyebrow rather than the furrowing kind.

What if you’re at a party and your guy looks at you across the room and he doesn’t drool. He doesn’t waggle his eyebrows like a cartoon letch. He doesn’t grab his crotch. But you know he’s thinking about a trip to the coat closet for a quickie.

Or when he’s annoyed to be stuck in a conversation. He’s too polite to show it, but the heroine can see it because she knows him. Unless the hero’s a two-year-old or has no self-control, the differences in his expressions are going to be subtle (like in real life) and, even with body language thrown in, hard to describe.

I think most authors know it’s a little ridiculous but, in my opinion, it’s a shortcut that works in the readers’ favor. Trying to describe the hero’s reactions from the heroine’s POV and vice versa would become wordy and unwieldy and repetitive to the point you’d want the telegraphing eyeballs back.

What about mood eyeballs?  “His eyes flashed their usual warm Mediterranean blue to an intense steely blue in a second.”  Maybe I don’t know enough people with blue eyes, but I’ve never seen them change color with emotion.

LOL—I found myself writing the eye thing the other day and had an inner ‘stop the madness!’ moment.

Would be nice if people were like pets: ears forward = happy, ears back = pissed off, ears down = guilty, ears to either side = WTF?

I dunno.

I can sort of see the raging fury in your eyes.

The flicker of disgust.

The impatience that lingers there among the shadows.  (the shadows may be glaucoma, see your opthamologist)

There is weariness in the pools of my eyes (no peeing in the pool!) as I leave for work.

I can also see you rolling your eyes. Stop it.

I think I’m mostly safe on that one, but my heroes eyebrows are forever bunching and contracting and furrowing and otherwise pantomiming a gamut of manful emotions. I also like to toss in a flaring nostril here and there when Lucy has some ‘splaining to do.

Yes!  A description of emotion on the face is great, but it always pulls me out of the story when it’s the eyeball itself showing that rage or desire.  When I was younger, I definitely wondered if it were just me who couldn’t read a man’s eyeballs like the heroines can!

In all fairness: anybody who thinks eyeballs can’t talk needs to watch Colin Firth as Darcy watch Lizzie play the piano. But I agree that this is an exceptional case.

Also, I’m with Katie Ann on the mood eyeballs. My boyfriend’s blue eyes do change color - but only if he’s wearing a different shirt. Can you just see it? “I was mad at you, but I’m not now. So you hang on for a minute while I run to my closet, and then you’ll be able to see it in my eyes!”

LOL.

I just wrote something last night like “Tiny, reflective eyeballs flashed as various rodents sought egress” but in all fairness, it’s a rough draft.

Eyes are the windows into the soul. You can tell a lot about a person just from his/her eyes. I know I can just hubby’s moods by the looks in his eyes. Drives him crazy that I can that, too.

Explains why some people like to hide behind sunglasses. They don’t want their eyes to give them away.

LMAO.  Okay, I’m going to have to skim the WIP for emotional eyeballs. I’ve probably got a few.

But I’d rather have the eyeballs flickering the emotion then, as Shannon mentioned, the hero rubbing his crotch from across the room…

*G* It’s a a good way to relay the needed mood.

Will try to work on the tense brows, though.  A bunched jaw, maybe.

Interestingly, most behavioral research indicates that women rarely watch eyes—men do, but not women. We watch mouths. Think about it next time you’re in a conversation. Really *try* to look into the other person’s eyes. It’s rather freaky and unnerving.

I think it’s the lids that are getting short shrift in this discussion. The eyeballs themselves don’t change much, aside from glistening more or less depending on how moist they are, plus ye oldie pupil dilation and contraction. But the eyelids do all the angry squinching, surprised widening, exhausted drooping, and amorous (or pissed off) narrowing.

Eyelids, can you has better PR in footure, pleez? The iBalls are stealing all your thunder.

I just finished reading “Where the Heart Leads” by Stephanie Laurens and this drove me crazy with the book.  Barnaby was constantly seeing how Penelope really did want to settle down with him and such in her eyes.  Swirling with desire, their eyes were.  Good gracious, but if my eyes start swirling, I think I might get jumped by men in white coats if-you-know-what-I-mean.

Shorthand or not, it can get taken to ridiculous lengths.  Like being able to tell that someone wants 2.5 kids and a picket fence because the “passion swirling in her eyes mixed with something deeper, a longing to be with him.  He could see her planning out their future, the years ticking past in those beautiful brown orbs.”  Not a direct quote, but it wouldn’t have been out of place in WTHL.

Security code: near69.  lol.

I have been noticing it a lot in my own stuff lately…and not just the eyes. It’s like everybody is “sighing” and “shaking their heads” and “folding their arms over their chests.”

Seems like all my people are varying levels of pissed off, doesn’t it?? Maybe they are as sick of my cliches as I am…

I think part of it, too, is that current fashion where explanatory dialogue verbs are out of style.

For example?
“What did you think?” she said.
        vs.
“What did you think?” she bit out.
“What did you think?” she huffed.
“What did you think?” she purred.
“What did you think?” she snarled.
“What did you think?” she replied.
“What did you think?” she smirked.

If you’re not allowed to use those words, then all the emotion has to come out someplace else. And they’ve picked the eyeballs.

I agree 100%!!  I have always been annoyed by my lack of ability to read eyes - I’ve never seen any emotions (other than tears) in someone’s eyes - facial expressions, sure - but I’ve never seen eyeballs express anything, nor have I seen eyes change colors (of course, my eyes are brown, so I’m already at a disadvantage).  BTW, I’ve also never really noticed flairing nostrils, nor do I recall back in the days of dating staring at someone’s mouth (or anyone staring at mine!).  I’m resigned to writers moving the plot along via emotive eyes, but I still think it’s awful silly and not at all realistic!  And Carrie - I agree w/you - I’m very uncomfortable staring into someone’s eyes when they talk - I watch their faces, not just their eyes!

If you’re not allowed to use those words, then all the emotion has to come out someplace else. And they’ve picked the eyeballs.

Well, let’s not put Angry Boner Man in a corner. I suspects his rage manifests itself just a few feet further south.

I’m with Cara McKenna on there being some emotion to be derived from eyes—if only from how they move, what they’re looking at, and what the eyelids/lashes are doing. My eyes sure as hell don’t change colour based on what I’m feeling, but there is definitely something going on even if it’s not in the eyeball, so to speak.

I will admit I’m guilty of using eyes for emotion, but it’s usually in the form of narrowing or squinting or pointedly not looking at things.

Heh. ‘degree33’. It’s all a matter of degree, really.

Right on (write on?), Sarah!

This reminds me of the time one of my writing profs asked us to go through one of our WIP chapters and highlight any short-phrase movements that were used with dialogue:  “he shrugged,” “She grinned,” “He raised an eyebrow.”

Turns out, our characters were twitching all over the place . . .

My husband studies human behavior and twists it in lovely ways for market research purposes, so I get the inside scoop on a lot of the “blink” sorts of behavior—such as where people watch during convos. Men watch eyes because they’re on the look-out for aggression. Women watch mouths because we’re more verbal and have a greater ability to read the physical cues taken from lips and their myriad expressions.

The best behavioral finds were where people first look when they see a naked person, and how long it takes for men and women to determine if a person is attractive…

Heh. Terry gross interviewed Colin Firth yesterday and talked a lot about how he, in A Single Man, tamped down emotion in his face and body, but his eyes mirrored his grief and pain.

I don’t think it’s ridiculous to write about emotion being in the eyes.  There’s a reason there’s the old saying that the eyes are the window to the soul, you know.

I’m willing to buy that by “eyes” most writers mean a combination of brows, lids, etc, but it would be nice if that was spelled out. Maybe the problem is that we read subtle cues, like fine lines to indicate tension, almost subconsciously so they’re hard to pin down. Regardless, I’d rather not feel that I’m supposed to be able to read the striations in someone’s irises like they’re some sort of secret language. I always feel like I’m missing my decoder ring or something.

And I don’t get the color-changing, either. The only people allowed to have mood-ring eyes are paranormal creatures.

Preach it, sister!

My eyes do seem to change color on a gray-to-green spectrum depending on my emotional state and I have seen the same in others with light colored eyes. However, the change is subtle and not likely something just an acquaintance would pick up on.

Lighter eyes have less melanin, with gray having the least. About 15% of Caucasians have eye color that changes around puberty (source: http://www.thetech.org/genetics/ask.php?id=30), which says to me that eye color is affected by hormone levels. While certainly lighting, pupil size, and clothing color can affect the perception of someone’s eye color, that article says this:

“The genes involved in eye color determine how much pigment gets made, how quickly it is degraded and where in your iris to put it. In other words, eye color is an ongoing process that is not necessarily set in stone.”

So, yes, it does seem both anecdotally and objectively that eye color can change. Just like anything else in writing, though, it can be over-used. Writing emotion is so so so so hard to do at all, let alone in an original way.

Regarding dialogue tags, I’m revising a novella right now where I forbade myself from using any sort of dialogue tag whether it’s “said,” “replied,” or the more descriptive ones. It’s the best story I’ve ever written because I forced myself to show emotion in ways I wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. Sometimes if an author has a strong enough voice these sorts of cliches fade in the background, so I think it really all comes down to balancing out all of the tools used to tell a story.

Thank you, SB Sarah!

I first wondered about this during my formitive years and ultimately concluded that I had a highly specialized form of autism that manifested as being the only person in the world who could not take social cues from someone’s eyes.

Pupils dilate or constrict. Aside from that, I get nothin’. Eyebrows, lids, eye contact, thinned lips, those red blotchy spots some people get when they’re thoroughly irked, however, speak to me fluently.

I agree with what seems to be the consensus. It’s shorthand for an author. Easier to write “anger flashing through his eyes” than describe three or four different areas of tension on the face and body. That is one really cool crutch in shifter stories. They can “smell” fear, desire, rage, etc. It makes sense in the story and doesn’t pull me out of the moment since I’m not a shifter and I can just take the author’s word for it.

Maybe the eye color-change thing is related to the instant attraction thing, where hero fastens his gaze on the target of desire and something inside clicks on and says, all tight-jawed and strained-zipper: MINE.

That said, I have to add that I could take one look at my second son’s light blue eyes and know when he was lying because they seemed to fade—gone the vibrant color, even as he exerted himself to look right into my cold hazel orbs. Methinks it is possible for slight color change, but unlikely anyone but a “familiar” could know what it meant.

OMG, this is so totally true.  She said, her eyes flashing.

I agree with this, especially when its strangers. How can you tell subtle social cues from someone you just met? Now with my sister and some of my best friends, I can tell how they feel by their face and my one friend and i can do the “communicating with the eyes so no one else knows what we are saying, but we get it” thing.

But it is so overused, the emotional eyes. I understand the rage. And you’d be able to tell from the red now flooding too my eyes. Though that may just be pink eye…. or a burst blood vessel.

It wasn’t the anger that flashed in your eyes. It was the smack upside the head. ;-)

Note to self: no more eyeballs

I dunno. Go to crazy with the facial details and I end up seeing Jim Carrey going rubber-faced. This is not a good look. Sometimes shorthand works.

Holding up hand. Guilty.

But in my defense, I come by the eye-color emotion descriptor from first hand experience. I actually went to high school with a girl whose eyes changed color, and in a truly bizarre way. She ordinarily had rather bland hazel eyes, but when she was upset, one eye went brilliant emerald green and the other went cocoa brown. She could never hide when she was angry or sad because all we had to do was look at her. Her boyfriend appreciate it because there was no mind-reading involved.

For that matter my own eyes change color from day to day — although it probably has more to do with what I’m wearing than how I feel. At various times, I’ve been described as blue-eyed, green-eyed, gray-eyed or hazel-eyed.  Since I’m never sure, I put hazel on my passport.

(Strangely, my captcha is remember72—which is when I was in HS with Jeri, the girl with the traffic signal eyes.  How do you guys do that??)

I have seen exactly ONE MOVIE where the character’s eyes played a decent role in his interpretation.

Did anyone else see Spiderman 3 in the movie theater? Did you keep feeling like the Sandman looked a little sad?

If you have it on DVD, pop it in and find a scene where he’s featured a lot. Keep your attention on his face and his eyes.

It was a lot more noticeable on the big screen, which really had me digging the movie (taking a Study of Film class from Mr. John Butler will do that to you).

Add me to the “So glad I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t see all those flashes of anger and lust flitting through people’s eyes” cmp.

Personally, I’m a fan of the subtle clench in a man’s jaw.

Side note - I remember reading about how people’s pupils dilate when seeing something/someone they love.
Took a quick trip down Google lane, and found this:
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/45165/the_science_behind_nonverbal_expression.html?cat=4

I’ve been told I have color-change eyes, too, but I have a theory about it. My eyes are greenish hazel, but when I cry they’re greener—like, bright chartreuse. I’ve studied enough color theory that I’m pretty sure it’s because of all the little red capillaries that crop up when I cry. Put red next to something vaguely green and because they’re complementary, the green will pop. That’s my theory, anyhow… I just know that people accuse me of wearing colored contacts when I’m upset.

I have never been able to read anyone’s emotions in their eyes, not even when I worked for an ophthalmologist as a Certified Ophthalmic Technician.  So I have never understood it though there are references all over the place.  I honestly think it’s really the facial features around the eyes that indicate the emotions, not the actual eyes.

I have never been able to read anyone’s emotions in their eyes, not even when I worked for an ophthalmologist as a Certified Ophthalmic Technician.  So I have never understood it though there are references all over the place.  I honestly think it’s really the facial features around the eyes that indicate the emotions, not the actual eyes.

There are several different aspects about eyes that either work or don’t work for me.  Descriptions of eye color that rival Lucy’s “kaleidescope eyes” don’t work for me.  Excessive detai about the irises—golden shards or rays, for example, don’t work for me, even though I actually have those. For some reason that level of detail pulls me away from what is happening in the characters and turns into some sort of clinical detail of what they look like, which I don’t care for. However, a lot of people like and need that detail, I guess.

On the other hand, when I say that I can read a lot of what a person is thinking and feeling through watching their eyes, I’m not talking about whether or not their pupils dilate (something I’ve never ever noticed in my life and always find a bit bizarre to read about, even though, again, I’m sure other people do see that). I’m talking about eyes crinkling with humor. Okay, the eyeballs certainly don’t, but being so specific as to always literally define that the eyelids did this, the corners of the eyes did that, etc. pulls me out of the story.  When somebody says eyes crinkled with humor, I see the entire eye area and read it that way.  Eyes that smoulder? Adrian Brody. I don’t usually have a problem with “eye language” as long as it is minor and merely enhances the character’s reactions.

However, if the author is incapable of portraying any emotion and tries to make the eyes be the emotion, that’s simply a weak writer and a totally different discussion.

In romance, we like to see the hero’s face.  The fault is when we substitute mind-reading for observation. 

It’s not just the eyes.  Stephen King wrote,
“So spare me, if you please, the hero’s sharply intelligent blue eyes and outthrust determined chin; likewise the heroine’s arrogant cheekbones.  This sort of thing is bad technique and lazy writing, the equalivalent of all those tiresome adverbs.”

Description just can’t do the job that ought to be carried by the dialogue or the action.

What about mood eyeballs?  “His eyes flashed their usual warm Mediterranean blue to an intense steely blue in a second.”  Maybe I don’t know enough people with blue eyes, but I’ve never seen them change color with emotion.

Ha!  Mood eyeballs!

What about people that can see the eye color - and hair color for that matter - in the dark?  We see in black and white when the light is dim (your rods work in dim light and only pick up black and white and your cones work in bright light and see color).  So I cringe when the hero’s eyes are blazing blue, green, hazel, whatever when they’re lit by moonlight.  Biology 101!

@Lisa Hendrix

Oh, me, too! Thank goodness I’m not the only one!

I’ve just given up trying to explain my eyecolor. I call it “Caucasian”...

My word is “thought87” which, after reading EbonyElizabeth and being a SQ Subber, is REALLY FUNNY.

I’ve often wondered if my eyes become bluer or darker when I’m aroused. It happens in my books all the time. So…. It must happen in real life, right? No?

Don’t tell me that the against the wall sex isn’t real either? I mean, it does seem like a difficult position, but it’s in WRITING, it has to be real. 

Okay, fine. But I’m not giving up on the panty ripping. Some day, some guy is totally going to rip off my panties. And I am going to be happy about it, not pissed that he ruined my favorite pair of Victoria’s secret.

Cara- My eyes are brown, edging on hazel, but they look hazel green when I cry, so I think you’re on to something there. (It doesn’t help that I go red and blotchy when I cry, so it ain’t just the capillaries in the eye they’re contrasting with.)

Studies have shown, and of course I can’t cite any now, that blood flow increases to the eye when you get angry, which can cause irises to appear somewhat darker. All the people I’ve known with grey/blue/green mood eyes tend to change with light level, light quality, and clothes, though.

On the eye contact vs. mouths thing… I’m high-functioning autistic. Eye contact makes me NERVOUS. Also, not so good at reading body language. I’d love to see a heroine divine the hero’s emotions from the set of his shoulders, though…

Virginia - I read that Stephen King book too!! When I did I immediately (uh oh, look out Mr. King, adverb alert) combed through my story to remove excess “she shrugged, he smiled” and all that other muck to make the dialogue stand on its own. Though one of my buds who is reading through the story said I wrote “he smiled” way too much. Back to editing!
I am guilty of writing the phrase “A flicker of something in his eyes” but it fit the scene.
The “seeing your future with me but the pulsating orbs in your head” always made me laugh in romance novels.

Oh, noes!

You’re gonna HATE my next book. *insert pouty face here*

I’m not normally big on the whole emotional eye thing (my editor says my characters are “bitey”, LOL!), but it’s a whole thing with my current hero. He has two different colored eyes, and the heroine often notices that they seem to hint at entirely different thoughts and emotions (it’s based on a boy I dated in college;  I SWEAR to you, his “eyes” were totally thinking different thoughts and I was well aware of which one was likely to tip the double and let me in on the joke).

The eyeballs are out of control in the book I’m finishing right now.

I almost put it down a couple times, but I ended up gritting my teeth (clenching my jaw?) and focusing on the story rather the ridiculous, magical ability of the hero and heroine to read a myriad of simultaneous, multiple emotions in each others’ eyes. My OWN eyes have rolled more than once, I can tell you.

In one scene, the heroine is watching the hero and for “a brief moment,” between someone saying something and his reply, his expression is unguarded—and she sees two paragraphs’ worth of surprise, anxiety, and deep desire for her. The woman must be some kind of idiot-savant people-reader.

Best use of bizarro eyeballs, Felix Harrowgate in Sarah Monette’s superb Labyrinthine series. He has one blue and one brown, with the blue being difficult to see out of but more “magical”. The blue and brown often contradict each other. And for whatever reason (could it be Sarah Monette’s incredible writing skillz?) it works.

I understand the need for it. The flicker of - fear, rage, laughter, insert appropriate emotion here- thing doesn’t bother me so much as long as people are not having silent conversations with their eyeballs:
She glared. translation: You’re a complete tool.
His eyes flickered in response and his manly eyebrow rose. You want me. You want me bad.
Her eyes flashed. Come near me and I will cut off your turgid manparts with rusty pinking shears.
His eyes flinched, then softened. You wouldn’t, you love my dominant/tender self.
Her eyes shined. Yes, yes, I love you! You foolish fool! Get your manparts over here and they had better be turgid.

Interesting about the eye-contact thing… Though I do allow my eyes to occasionally flicker away from the subject so as not to be engaging in a staring contest, I’m a very heavy eye-contact person. I’ve always done it, though it does get you labeled as “aggressive” - not so bad when you work in a heavily male-dominated industry. The downside is that some men read anything but the briefest eye contact as sexual interest, ugh!

My bf, on the other hand, is made keenly uncomfortable by prolonged eye contact and so he is perceived as shy and retreating (until he makes some smartass remark). Because of that, I thought he was totally unattracted to me until he spoke up about it! I have to demand that he look at me when we’re having an important discussion, because otherwise I can’t read his intent or reactions very well. So telegraphing of emotions by eye contact *is* pretty important, although I’m not 100% certain how these people in books are sending along the equivalent of a paragraph in a single look.

Having read this, I had to experiment in front of a mirror. My conclusion is that while it is possible to convey emotion using only the eyes and not the lower part of the face, it’s all about the muscles around the eyes, not the eyeball itself. The only way the eyeball is involved is if it’s moving - rolling the eyes, looking away - or if the pupil changes size (which I cannot do consciously, but maybe someone is able to). And come to think of it, it’s a muscle that changes pupil size too.

I’ve been told I have color-change eyes, too, but I have a theory about it. My eyes are greenish hazel, but when I cry they’re greener—like, bright chartreuse. I’ve studied enough color theory that I’m pretty sure it’s because of all the little red capillaries that crop up when I cry. Put red next to something vaguely green and because they’re complementary, the green will pop. That’s my theory, anyhow… I just know that people accuse me of wearing colored contacts when I’m upset.

Cara, I think this is definately the colour theory thing. I also have greenish-hazel eyes that become much greener when I cry, but also when I swim in a chlorinated pool, or get an eyelash in my eye - basically anything that irritates my eye and makes the white red.

I don’t think this is shorthand.  It’s the way a lot of people interpret facial gestures.  Maybe the literal action is that a character’s eyes crinkled at the corners, but others may only have registered the change as somehow being a smiling type of look, without being sure what physical cues they were reading.

Oh! OH! I have another theory! The magic eyeball is actually a reflection of what the observer wants to see. She wants to be desired? His eyes flash with lust. She wants to pick a fight? Rage flickers in his eyes. The possible combinations are infinite.

Eh. Shortcuts are bad enough. It’s when a writer seems to believe that the eyes can literally be like windows that it becomes ridiculous: seas raging, storms brewing, rain showers approaching, lightning flashing, specular sunbeams streaming earthward through cumulonimbus, yada yada yada. All of it contained in the improbably-colored irises of some poor schmoe. It’s just one more Bad Romance Trope (TM) I wish would go away.

Pathetic fallacy: Ur doing it rong.

I don’t mind the occasional mention of something showing in the eyes as long as it’s defined. It’s the undefined that gets annoying such as “something she couldn’t understand flickered in his eyes” “a mysterious heat showed in her eyes” conjunctivitis maybe?

I often find myself mimicking all the eyeball emoting in a book as a read.  I also often embarrass myself on the bus during my commute.  These two things are related.

What really gets me is when people sensually lower their eyelids.  Or, when fury caused their eyelids to lower.  In fact, anything involving a lowered or half-closed eyelid that isn’t indicative of sleepiness just DEMANDS that I try it.  Then my girlfriend is all, “what’s wrong with your face?” when I try to make the smoochy time.

My writing teachers used to tell me that over-focus on the eyes was a telltale sign the author tended to watch a lot of tv/movies rather than reading widely.

IMHO, one of the best things about a book is that you get to be IN it.  So go for all five senses, darn it! :D

My writing teachers used to tell me that over-focus on the eyes was a telltale sign the author tended to watch a lot of tv/movies rather than reading widely.

Might also be a sign that we spend a lot of time studying people, LOL! I know I do. I’ll be on the train, I’ll spot an interesting person, and suddenly I’m noodling around with how I’d describe them. And if you’re writing romance, expressions are key. So much of a romantic relationship (esp at the beginning) is wrapped up in how we see/interpret emotions/expressions on the face of the other person.

And lord knows I read a hell of a lot more than I watch T.V. (grew up without one, and even now only watch specific things I prerecord), but I still find myself concerned with minutia of expression when I write.

Those eye phrases usually don’t get to me, it’s the change in eye color that bother me! Now, if they darken a little with desire, that’s a real phenomena (in men, the pupil enlarges when aroused). Or, say, the person is in the sunlight vs. dark room, that can affect color. But to just abruptly change… not right.

Really, it can be difficult, and therefore annoying to the reader, to describe all the facial details, as an explanation of HOW and WHY one character understands subtle emotional and mental changes in the other. Women are actually very attuned to non-verbal cues, especially in the face. Biologically, it’s one of our strengths! So, I understand and accept many of the “eye” descriptions.

Could we have smellavision instead?  Perhaps a whiff of terror.  Or a wafting of pungent fart.

Something to invoke the nose!

His sticky sweat smelled of that manly musk and cod liver oil, making her think he was truly manly and health conscious.

Not used as an emotional revelation, but the worst eye reference I’ve ever seen was in a fanfic -

Hermione’s eyes were described as “melting chocolate orbs”.

I mean ... eewww! One’s eyeballs should not be slowly slipping down one’s cheeks.

Is it any better if it’s a flicker of emotion around the eyes rather than in the eyes? It’s more accurate, but is it any less annoying to those who dislike this? I’m not particularly bothered either way, except as other people have said, when people have mood eyes - far too reminiscent of the bad-fic on babb_chronicles. DO NOT WANT!

Err…guilty. I’m gonna rig a shock collar to go off now every time I write that phrase…

It had been too long since he’d been with a woman! She saw that emotion flit across his eyeballs, mingling with ruthless rage and uncompromising desire…she thought she also might have seen a hint of sensitivity, but the alpha male quickly extinguished it leaving only the rage. Well, and the desire. And the too long since he’d been with a woman horny-pants thing…

Security word Cannot 22…as in “She cannot possibly read all twenty two emotions that flash across his eyes…”

Regarding dialogue tags, I’m revising a novella right now where I forbade myself from using any sort of dialogue tag whether it’s “said,” “replied,” or the more descriptive ones. It’s the best story I’ve ever written because I forced myself to show emotion in ways I wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.

Oh my god. I am so stealing that idea. I haven’t set myself a ridiculously difficult writing challenge in far too long. I am going to do this.

Re: sensing emotions through eye contact- being one of those people who already tends to pick up thoughts and emotions from other people just by being near them (I think it partly has to do with picking up chemical changes in their scent, like animals do) I have a lot of trouble making eye contact with people because it feels so incredibly intimate to me- your eyes lock and then suddenly you’re completely and totally aware of them and this is really awkward. I’ve been told that eye contact is necessary for people to trust you and it’s rude not to make it, but I cannot do it without feeling like I’m hitting on the person. It’s too intimate.  It’s too much.

Regarding dialogue tags, I’m revising a novella right now where I forbade myself from using any sort of dialogue tag whether it’s “said,” “replied,” or the more descriptive ones. It’s the best story I’ve ever written because I forced myself to show emotion in ways I wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.

Hope it works for you. I pretty much try never to use dialogue tags. I much prefer using physical tags and bits of description to ground the dialogue. I also have a mad hatred for thought tags: “he thought” “she wondered” etc. They pull me out of the story. If the POV isn’t strong/deep enough for me to know without a tag that these are thoughts of character X, you’ve got serious work to do.

ROTFL! I never really thought about it (eyebrows furrowed)! Thanks Sarah! Now, I’m going to end up laughing in every book I read!

Speaking of eyeballs, apparently in the Romanciverse, it’s pretty uncommon to have blue eyes, or brown eyes (aka, the most popular eye colors on the planet). Heck no, blue and brown are The Dull. Romance heroines have eyes of violet, steel grey, golden, and green.

And if the eyes are blue, they are azure,beryl, blue-gray, blue-green, cerulean, cobalt, indigo, navy, royal, sapphire, teal, turquoise, ultramarine, or the color of your favorite blue flower…

I understand that it’s all some kind of shorthand for “She’s pretty. NO, not just pretty, she’s extra special, uniquely, double-plus Gooooood Lookin’.” But damn, all those violet eyed chicks get on my nerves.

On their passport applications, do you think Romance Heroines put “Cerulean” for Eye Color, and “Sable” for Hair Color?

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

OMG!  I deliberately had a little fun with mood ring eyes in my book.  I had the hero’s eyes literally change color with mood, and glow on top of it so we can see all those vivid colors in the dark, because that always drove me nuts too.

I also think the mysterious color changing eyes thing is silly so I set out to try to make it plausible.  It was fun, but clearly driven by all these magical eyes in romance novels.  This whole discussion has me falling out of my chair.

I don’t mind eye descriptions in the novels I read so long as they aren’t a crutch.  Eye contact is intimate, and eye contact is the first spark of real intimacy between the characters.

But I completely see your point, enough that I had to play with the trope in my own work.

Fun fun, this is one of my guilty pleasures of romances.

In all fairness: anybody who thinks eyeballs can’t talk needs to watch Colin Firth as Darcy watch Lizzie play the piano.

This!  Holy cow, that was AWESOME!  That’s the bit I remember best out of the whole miniseries.

I like talking eyeballs.  Yes, it’s shorthand, but it is an attempt to show emotion, show body language, instead of “He became very angry with her, and showed it in his body language.”

I dunno. Go to crazy with the facial details and I end up seeing Jim Carrey going rubber-faced. This is not a good look. Sometimes shorthand works.

This, too.

And (she admitted, a little embarassed) when I was a ‘tween I was TOTALLY intrigued by the one eyebrow raising.  I practiced it in a mirror for months, and now I do it automatically.  I can also wiggle my ears, which may be related…

By the way, is that whole changing of eye colour for people with multiple personalities a myth?  A quick google search is inconclusive, and I have no time for an in-depth one.  Anybody know off the top of your head?

Ha!  groups53

This is brilliant! I too have actually spent time wondering if perhaps I was just less perceptive than others because I was unable to see the darkening of arousal, etc in others’ eyes…....so this really cracked me up.

Then I put down the computer and picked up my book, only to find within two pages- I am not making this up- his eyes “burning her exposed flesh with his gaze”!!! OUCH!!

I often find myself mimicking all the eyeball emoting in a book as a read.  I also often embarrass myself on the bus during my commute.

Mfred, I do the same thing!

I’ll be reading and I feel Hubbs staring at me so I look up- he’ll ask if I’m okay because my eyes are squinching and my forehead is warped like an old record. Uhm, yes hon I’m fine- just finding out that the man I loved was really my Father’s killer’s twin brother. 

The one thing I have never been able to do is bat my eyelashes. I have lashes longer than a mile yet I can’t look through them or bat them about. How do people do that?
(I may or may not have tried for hours and only ended up with a headache.)

I used to referee judo tournaments, and a revered, high ranked, international referee used to say that you could tell which player was going to throw by watching their eyes.  Since I never reached a level beyond watching their bodies so I could get out of the way and hopefully score the throw correctly, I can’t testify to this personally. 

I can sometimes tell when people are lying by looking in their eyes, but I think that says more about why I’m looking in their eyes in the first place (to evaluate truthfulness) and how people use their eyes to convey or mask emotion.  My kids would sometimes stare fixedly into my eyes while telling whoppers; in fact, I may have done it once or twice myself, no doubt having heard that liars are betrayed by their shifty eyes.  I’ve also seen people widen their eyes when trying to fight off tears—like exposing more surface area will air dry the eyeballs.  My youngest daughter’s hazel eyes also seem to show much greater play of color when she’s happy than when she’s depressed, except when they’re shiny with suppressed tears.

I can’t say I spend a lot of time staring into people’s eyes; I find it intrusive.  However, I do think people use their eyes deliberately at times to try to communicate.  Unfortunately, interpretation is all.  I tried staring down an obnoxious high school student once, thinking that my eyes were saying “I’m on to you, you little creep.”  He and his equally obnoxious buddies read it as “The bitch thinks you’re hot!  Ha-ha-ha!”  Therefore, I now avoid these experiments.  Seems to me that a writer could have a lot of fun with the potential for misinterpretation, though.

This post SERIOUSLY cracked me up! Especially the “harbored in their eyeballs” phrase.

Yes! Yes! Yes! This one really bugs me. It’s the laziness in writing that helps prejudice readers against the “bodice-rippers” and sort of ruins some books that would otherwise make my favorites list. Let’s stop with the cliches, please. It’s not just about the eyeballs, although this is a perfect example. I dislike reading the same descriptions in different books OVER and OVER again because writers don’t take the time to really SEE what their characters are doing. And the whole discussion on eye color change. Yes, eye color does change (my eyes are hazel and they can go from greenish brown to yellowish brown) but the changes are almost always subtle and don’t happen in a flash. I’m so tired of reading about hero’s eyes flashing to black because they’re horny. Even if their eyes started out blue in the first place. Black, for god’s sake!

Just on the subject of the horniness darkening eyes, or the ‘black eyes’ thing…which, I’ll admit is a bit overboard…It’s because pupils expand when your aroused. Yep. It’s true. I used to scoff at it when I saw it in books, but I watched the Science of Sex on TLC or History or something, and they mentioned that.

My hazel eyes dimmed with fear that someone on this board is judging my Golden Heart entry. The normal sparkle dulled to the sad yellow of a taxidermy tiger’s cheap glass orbs after I realized I will never have the nerve to send Smart Bitches a book to review.

Right. Now you’ve all given me one more word to put on my “find/replace” list along with just, too, up, down, -ing ... eye. (I know for a fact I wrote my hero has tortured eyes. Ack.)

Ooh, ooh, do “bit off” and “ground out” next!  Julia Quinn is the worst for those, but I’m currently reading one by another author — bad sign that I can remember neither title nor writer — where the hero, within the span of a single page, “ground out,” “bit off,” “bit out,” “snapped,” and, for good measure, “glared.”

(My verification word is said26.  “Said,” ha.  No one simply says when there’s biting off to do.)

On their passport applications, do you think Romance Heroines put “Cerulean” for Eye Color, and “Sable” for Hair Color?

My mother told me I had “sable” hair once, but she reads lots of romance novels of the Olde Schoole. And, actually, it’s the best way to describe brown-almost-black with no red or blonde highlights. I reckon, heh.

I also have grey-blue eyes (nope, they’re not true blue, nor true grey), but I think being a dyed-in-the-wool lesbo luckily saves me from Romance Heroinehood. :-)

My mother told me I had “sable” hair once, but she reads lots of romance novels of the Olde Schoole. And, actually, it’s the best way to describe brown-almost-black with no red or blonde highlights. I reckon, heh.

Well in dogs, we call that color seal. So you could have seal hair, which invokes thoughts of blubber and flippers. HTH!

Hey Trix, if you want to be Romance Heroine, you go right ahead and be one. EVERYONE gets to be the Heroine of their own romance!  And if you want to call your hair Sable, that’s okay by me too (but I probably WILL roll my plain blue eyeballs when you do! Heh.) 

(My hair is a spectacularly ordinary shade of middling brown that I like to call “hair colored”. Not as exciting as sable, raven, titian, auburn, golden, silver, and other Romanciverse hair colors, but it keeps my head warm. Probably the fact that I have hair colored hair and blue eyes is one of the reasons that exotique Romance hair and eyes macht mir miffed.)

I say again, if I ever, ever, ever mean “eyeballs” in a romance, I will say “eyeballs.” OTOH, if I say “eyes” I mean the eyeballs, irises, pupils, lids and maybe even brows. The whole package. So, yes, there is a lot of emotion given away by the eyes. Their movement. Tension around them. Pupil dilation. Length of stare. Sorry, I can’t agree with you here. Unless, of course, I talk of the tremendous rage in his sclera.

This post ruined some of my reading time this past week!  Ha!  Makes me pause when I read emotional eye scenes! *snort*

I do realize that it conveys a lot of emotions without writing out the related thoughts….

Yes dear broads I am right there with you.  About the eye color thingie—silver eyes, grey with flecks of gold, white with navy blue rims—let’s just go for it and have dark red eyes! Pls this drives me so nuts.  Does anyone have a real pic of someone with silver/grey eyes??? xxoocf

I’m with Jessica.  This never bothered me, until I read this post.  Then, I was reading “Spider’s Bite” by Jennifer Estep (which has some great food scenes in it, by the way) and in at least three places she had a character’s eyes “flash from (emotion one) to (emotion two) to (emotion three) and sometimes (emotion four) in the space of a minute.”  And she always closed a scene with it. 

And it drove. me. CRAZY.