Writing Advice: Physicality

I’ve been going through a lot of revision lately, so I want to talk about a thing that I’ve been working on. Physicality—communicating the sense of being in the character’s body with physical sensations—is easier for me to remember to do with a furry character because that’s part of the point of it, after all. How does wind feel through your fur? How does your tail move? How does the position of your ears communicate your emotions? You want the reader to feel these details so that they share the feeling of being embodied in the character (one of the things we furries look for in furry fiction is that feeling of embodiment).

(Sidebar: it always frustrates me when I’m reading furry stories where the author tells me the main character’s species on page one and then there’s no physicality in the story at all. It’s not even a “human in animal suit” thing; it’s a question of what the point of having a furry character—or any non-human character—is, if you’re not going to share the experiences of being in a non-human body?)

But the second Wolftown book, like the first, has a human main character, and he doesn’t have a tail or movable ears or fur. So I have to remember to think about how it feels to be him.

This isn’t just “describe what the five senses perceive.” That’s an important part of description, of course, because you want to give the reader the details of what they would be seeing, smelling, hearing, and feeling (movement, temperature, etc.) if they were in the character’s world. But physicality goes beyond that. The aim is to capture how it would feel to be the character in that situation.

So not just smell, but what physical reaction does the smell elicit? Uneasiness in the stomach (nausea)? Salivating? A prickling on the back of the neck? The character may be hot or cold, but what does that mean? Sweat trickling down their spine? Numb fingertips? Wrapping arms around themself shivering?

Physicality is most effective when it’s in reaction to the character’s environment or what’s happening in the story. If you say, “their words were unsettling,” that communicates how the character feels, but if you say, “their words set his stomach to churning, and for a moment he swayed dizzily on his feet,” that gives the reader a much more visceral feel for how the character reacts.

A lot of these reactions fall under the category of interoception, which is the group of sensations the body uses to self-regulate: hunger, internal temperature, fatigue, etc. These are good things to keep in mind in any case, but especially useful when you want to think about how it feels to be the character in that situation.

If you’re unsure about how to write physical reactions like this, a good exercise is to jot down (in a notebook or on your phone) your own physical reactions to various situations. When you have to deliver bad news to someone, what are the specific physical reactions you have? When you’re excited, where do you feel that? When you’re frustrated with work, or apprehensive about a meeting, how does that manifest physically?

Study your reactions to get a sense of how you can communicate your character’s feelings to your reader. With improved physicality in your writing, your stories will become more real to the reader and more compelling.