Are your characters constantly staring, gazing, and looking? Now and then they throw in a glare, glance or glower? While we tend to read eyes as a way to gauge emotion, writers can and should strive to be original in their descriptions and actions.
Writing Tip for Today: For any character, getting beyond “looking” can be a challenge, but here are some suggestions:

• Get Your Characters Moving. How many scenes are set around a table or other venue where your characters do little more than sit and gab? Think of ways to get your characters talking and moving around. If you do, your dialogue action tags (Beats of action in place of “he said”) will be able to do more than roll eyes or take a sip of tea.
• Concentrate on the Emotion you want the Character to Portray. I ran across a wonderful Emotion Thesaurus on a blog called The Bookshelf Muse. In it, different emotions are described through actions and inner feelings, (her stomach clenched) so a writer doesn’t have to label the emotion (she felt angry).
• Energize Your Story. Go through a draft of a scene you’ve written and highlight all the “looked,” “stared” or other visual descriptions. Change up a lot of these and you’ll see your story come to life. And try to think of ways that characters can interact away from the table. Write a scene where one character is trying to talk to another who is mowing the lawn, calming a fussy baby or churning butter. The first character will feel silly just standing there and could jump into the activity or follow the character around.