This is it, we're on the downward slope to the end. It's mostly just little things now, so stick your legs out and freewheel, ringing your bell gleefully! But avoid the crocodile pit.

This one's about what's known in the trade as 'stage directions'. These are actions that you describe your characters (and, I guess, props) making. They don't tend to be terribly interesting, and so when you're editing you need to decide how much they're propelling the story forwards. However, if you have too few, your reader doesn't know where your characters or what they're doing. So, the magic here is deciding what to cut and what to keep.

Here's an example of some dialogue mixed in with stage directions. Look at all the movement.

Ariane stepped towards the portal, drawn by her curiosity and its strange gravity. She lifted her hand up and had to fight hard to stop it from being sucked in.

'That's weird,' she said. She turned to Gregor. 'So if I go through there I'll end up in a magical land full of fauns and elves and stuff?'

Gregor put his hand on her shoulder. 'This one's out of warranty and sends you to a world where you star in cookery shows, so I'd stay away.'

They're called 'stage directions' because they might appear in a script. They tend to be very tied to dialogue. Here's my manuscript continued as an incredibly badly formatted script, to show you what I mean:

Ariane steps back.

ARIANE

Yeah, I've no desire to be on Iron Chef for eternity. What else have you got?

GREGOR

(pointing to a different part of the shop)

Now, over there we have what I call 'The Lion, the Ring, and the Wizarding' section. If you'll follow me...

The two actual stage directions here, where Ariane steps back and Gregor points, are the kind of thing we're most interested in. Although they might be necessary in scripts so you can block out character movement (maybe? I know exactly nothing about screen writing) they tend to bog down fiction and so we have to treat them with caution. But they are also vital for some kinds of thing: after all, action scenes are mostly stage directions, and if you don't have enough you can't figure out what's going.

As a result, unlike, say, hedging, it's one of those things where there's no right answer. It's a stylistic choice, and feeds into the pace of your writing style. There's always going to be someone who doesn't like your pacing, and that's fine. It's why there's room for all of us in this game. But, like all things, understanding what levers we can pull is useful.

Let's do this one like the dialogue tags one; I'll rattle through some guidelines, and then we can take stock at the end.

First: the best stage directions move the story on in important ways, and those ones tend to stay. These are particularly the case in action.

Ariane scooped up her sword, and thrust it into the demon's chest. It quacked like an angry duck, and then, with a hiss, collapsed into sand, the grains tumbling around her blade onto the sun-bleached earth. She stepped back, and smirked.

'Yeah, death's a beach, isn't it?' she said.

By my count there are six actions here, plus a dialogue tag. Of them the first four are, I think, essential. She needs to kill the sand demon, and you need to see it dying, otherwise you won't know what happened, so they absolutely stay. The next two, stepping back and smirking, isn't needed. Should I keep them?

And that's where we get into pacing. I like the brief breather before the speech, so I kept it. You don't have to: they're absolutely not moving the story along which means if I wanted to save a few words, I could delete them.

Second: stage directions show what characters think without you having to use the dread word 'obviously'. These tend to be the very things that you don't put into a script.

Ariane stepped up to the plinth, and put her sword down. Gregor picked up her weapon. He held it briefly, disdain inscribed on his face. Then he plunged it into the blade tree, with far more force than was necessary.

'So we do puns now, do we?' he said. 'Is it going to be catchphrases next?'

Ariane winced.

'May I remind you,' he continued, gripping the plinth so hard that his knuckles were white, 'that we have one rule here, which you are constantly on the verge of breaking. No Eighties movie tropes.'

I used an adverb, 'briefly'. Because it's an adverb of time, I claim I can mostly get away with it, but, I mean, you can be the judge. However, the intent here was to use stage directions to show what's going through our non-POV character's mind without even slightly breaking POV. Gregor is unhappy, and you know that, from his actions, without me writing 'Gregor was obviously unhappy'. Making the effort means I have built up 'obviously' points for when I'm tired or in a hurry or just can't be bothered to write well.

For this showing-not-telling emotion thing, you have a lot of tricks. Like, a lot. There's a whole book of them: it's called The Emotion Thesaurus and it's entirely full of actions your characters can take to show emotion. You should maybe consider buying it?

But the fact is, you can overuse these! You only need a small number of them. I think I probably went over the top with all the rage symbols.

Rule three, which is: yes, show emotion through action and move the plot, but go easy on the boring and cliched stage directions.

Ariane breathed hard as the rhinos stampeded around them. When they'd finished thundering past, Gregor walked towards her with a lazy swagger. He looked hard at her, his orange eyes drilling into her soul.

'I think,' said Ariane, 'that I may have lost a contact lens.'

Your three cliches here are breathing, walking and looking. Every time you see a boring action like this, ask yourself, am I doing this to pad? Can I do it in a better way? Here, Gregor staring at her with a sweaty intensity maybe gets you somewhere later, so fine; but look, we've all seen the 'staring into soul' trope so it might be worth a revision. Walking, though, is really hard to justify in any scene because it's boring, although your reader might be confused by a sudden teleport, so you know, needs must sometimes. And breathing is something that I'm ashamed to say that I write far too much: exhaling, inhaling, holding breaths, yes it's all too easy to put in as an action beat in speech but, maybe, I'd have been better off cutting.

At the end of the day, we want to paint a vivid picture of what's going on. Too few stage directions and it won't feel rich, the dialogue will just sit there with no context. Too many, and we're bogged down by people who constantly breathe, walk, look and swallow. They feel fidgety. So use your judgement.

Rule four: if it's implied you generally don't need to show it.

Ariane picked up her phone. She found the app, pressed the numbers, and it started to make a noise that she associated with being underground.

'We're in a magical alternative realm,' said Gregor. 'I don't think reception's going to be great.'

Yeah you wouldn't write someone using their phone like this, I did it to make a point. But if you think about it, this is a direct command to tell, not show. Yes! We don't show people using the phone, we just tell you that they are. We're breaking the supposed golden rule. But at the end of the day, all stories are telling: there's a reason it's called storytelling, not storyshowing. It's just that through telling we show other things, deeper, implied things. Stage directions are direct statements of what your characters are doing, and you want them to be as pointed as possible, so you don't need to beat around the bush 'showing' people doing mundane things when the reader can understand from context. Just tell your reader that your character tried her phone and omit anything that the reader can easily figure out.

#

It's the most magical time of the chapter, the summary.

Stage directions are like the bits in a script that aren't scene descriptions or lines. They're not always your friends.

Stage directions stay if they move the plot or show emotion, but use a light touch, and think about the rhythm of the prose. Ideally they won't be boring or cliched, and walking, breathing and looking fall into this trap. You can ditch 'obvious' ones and cut to the chase.