On one of the Reddit writing forums, a discussion arose about why some writers seem to overuse physical actions. Months later, I would discover that another user had coined a term, “screenplay-izing”, for just the phenomenon I discuss below.

We’re often advised— warned, really— to “show, don’t tell”. But then people overdo it.

I’m willing to be the reason authors overuse physicality is that, although they’re writing a novel, in their heart of hearts they’re already imagining it as a movie. And so they write as though they were transcribing the movements of actors.

Feeling as though you’re watching a film of your ideas does have an undeniable intensity about it. Using this technique can really make the writing flow. But without fully realizing it, writers who let the imaginary actor do his thing are also taking on the great handicap of film: movies can’t tell viewers what a character is thinking.

At their best, screenplays can and do work around this limitation by making thought visible through meaningful actions—one of my very favorites is how, at the start of Chinatown, Jake chooses to give his client the cheap liquor rather than the good one.

But it’s not easy to think of such beautiful instances of action-showing-thought. Often the imaginary actors simply fidget. When they do, we end up reading a lot of clichés: written packing peanuts like characters who “freeze in their tracks” and “look one another up and down”, whose jaws drop open and so forth.

While it’s possible that readers skip right over such set-phrases like they do the word “said”, a piece of writing loaded with them becomes, most ironically, far from active. Instead it sags like a worn-out cleaning sponge loaded with used and re-used dishwater. The imaginary actors fade from vivid, sharply imaginable people to boring cutouts. If we as writers can’t come up with revealing actions on the Chinatown level, then by all means we ought to utilize the superpower of literature: our ability to simply state character thoughts.