…about “The Gaze”
A few weeks ago, I fell into a writing slump. It was an editing hangover. I had done “a very big thing” to my manuscript and my cup runneth empty. So I reached for a surefire dopamine hit: romance. (Books!) I started reading half a dozen novels, some old favorites, some new discoveries. And I didn’t finish a single one. The dopamine wasn’t dopamining. So I started binge-watching romcoms and dramas on 2x speed, increasingly despondent at the lack of happy juice in my brain.
And then, I started a Thai BL series called Top Form. And OMG did the neurons in my parched brain light up like Christmas.
The premise of the story is that gorgeous “veteran” actor Akin is paired up with handsome newcomer Jin and they find love against the backdrop of a predatory film industry. The actors were magnificent. The plot, touching. The director deserves a medal for how this series was shot. I’m obsessed.
But this one scene in particular had me by the throat.
For those who don’t want to watch two beautiful men have a beautiful moment, here’s the gist. Akin pulls Jin aside when Jin can’t tap into his emotions to cry on command and by gazing into each others’ eyes, they both tap into their emotional core and cry.
People, when I tell you that I was verklempt… and I wasn’t the only one!
The actors got emotional rewatching the scene IRL…
…and every time they recreate it.
Why did this hit so hard?
The actors said it best: “This is the beginning of both of them. This scene has a lot of stillness inside. It’s the first time that Akin and Jin have synchronization.” The action–a poke–is so minimal, but the scene is so charged that the action becomes difficult. They do so much while doing very little at all. And that sent my brain into hyperdrive.
“The Gaze” is “A Thing.”
Officially, in media, there is a trope called the “Held Gaze.” According to the TV tropes wiki, “they will find themselves gazing deeply into each other's eyes, one indication of their [unresolved sexual tension]. This can often precede an Almost Kiss, as this is usually what is happening before that. If this is an extremely intense gaze into the other's eyes, this might be an indication that a Big Damn Kiss is on the horizon. It can also be a platonic look between two friends.” It comes in four flavors:
Romantic: This will appear at least once, accompanied by some passion on one (or both) of the partners in the gaze, hence it fits into the passionate look variant of the trope.
Platonic: Two friends will hold each other's gaze meaningfully to either encourage the other or to just let them know that they are there for them.
Antagonistic: If the two of them are rivals or enemies, however, this becomes a classic staredown, with both characters trying their level best to out-intimidate the other.
Supernatural: A shared gaze where souls gaze into the other person's soul, all at once having a deeper experience than the other two versions mentioned above can have.
The flavor depends on the story or the point in the story where the specific held gaze occurs. But in “action” it’s just two people holding each other’s gazes. The meaning ascribed changes depending on… what exactly? And, what exactly tells the observer of the gaze what the vibe is?
In visual media, you usually get a lot of cues. Music. Lighting. The way it’s framed by the director. The timing of the gaze in the narrative story. But usually, it’s the actors’ faces doing all the work. Showing us what is happening internally during the charged moment and the evolution of the experience as they react to the other person’s experience. And it happens in (relative) silence.
Cool–but what about in writing? I mean, the held gaze is a “big moment” in most books, too.
I pulled out the books I’d rifled through on my most recent dopamine-chase. Then I pulled some other genres–horror in particular. Then I grabbed a couple of police procedurals I had stashed in my bookcase. I searched for “held gazes” at various points in the story. And I was floored.
As writers, we’re short-changing “the gaze.”
We give it one or two lines. The context clues usually involve describing the intention of the character initiating the gaze. For example, we’re told/shown that one character is in distress. The other might “search her face” or “catch her gaze” in order to ascertain whether she’s ok. Then we might get a line or two describing the way the gaze evolves. If you’ve ever watched tiktok videos on “overused expressions in books,” you’re probably familiar with this perennial favorite: “his eyes darkened.” Maybe we get a “her lip curled” or “their eyebrows narrowed” or something else happening on the face, but we don’t get a whole lot. Depending on the genre, we will get some words about the emotional impact the gaze is having on the POV character. In cases of an antagonistic or assessing held gaze, we get more, because there is an inherent “sizing up” of the opposition, a comparison between the POV character and the “other-ness” of their opponent. But we are sorely lacking in elaborating on the moment of connection–the soul-to-soul recognition of “sameness.”
And here’s what kills me: I’m not entirely sure how to do it better. One of the critiques we throw around as writers is about “head hopping” or guessing/knowing what the other character is thinking. This is especially problematic when we’re limited by 1st person POV or close 3rd, and we are required to live within the confines of our POV character’s knowledge. But inherent in the gaze is a strange, almost metaphysical exchange of information that transcends spoken word. It has its own energy, its own stimuli, its own purpose. And because we don’t talk about it often enough, efforts to describe it feel…weak? Trite? Too woo-woo and too head-hoppy all at once.
What is happening during the gaze?
A complex and information-heavy “language of the eyes”
“Eye gaze is a surprisingly rich source of information about one’s interest, intentions, and goals. For instance, prior research indicates that specific goals and intentions influences a person’s gaze direction and allocation of social attention (Argyle & Cook, 1976; Baron-Cohen, 1995; Emery, 2000; Rupp & Wallen, 2007), and a growing number of studies support a functional coupling of goal-directed actions/intentions and selective visual processing before action (e.g., Land, & Lee, 1994; Land, Mennie, & Rusted, 1999). Moreover, decoding and understanding the language of the eyes is a skill that plays a major role in social cognition and interpersonal interaction (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Emery, 2000).”
The mere fact someone meets our gaze changes our perception of them.
“We make assumptions about people’s personalities based on how much they meet our eyes or look away when we are talking to them. And when we pass strangers in the street or some other public place, we can be left feeling rejected if they don’t make eye contact.”
Gazing eyes fixate our attention and imagination to the exclusion of our surroundings and to the detriment of our ability to perceive and remember anything else.
“A recurring finding is that gazing eyes grab and hold our attention, making us less aware of what else is going on around us (that ‘fading to grey’ that I mentioned earlier). Also, meeting someone’s gaze almost immediately engages a raft of brain processes, as we make sense of the fact that we are dealing with the mind of another person who is currently looking at us. In consequence, we become more conscious of that other person’s agency, that they have a mind and perspective of their own – and, in turn, this makes us more self-conscious.”
“Similar research has found that meeting the direct gaze of another also interferes with our working memory (our ability to hold and use information in mind over short periods of time), our imagination, and our mental control, in the sense of our ability to suppress irrelevant information.”
We interpret and ascribe meaning to the gaze and the person behind it.
“As well as sending our brains into social overdrive, research also shows that eye contact shapes our perception of the other person who meets our gaze. For instance, we generally perceive people who make more eye contact to be more intelligent, more conscientious and sincere (in Western cultures, at least), and we become more inclined to believe what they say.”
Gaze has intense implications for both love and lust and can increase both.
“[N]eural dissociations between love and lust suggest that these two phenomena may, in turn, sustain separable behaviors and automatic attention processes, with the visual features of a person’s body especially relevant for sexual desire and the visual clues regarding a person’s mental state (i.e., eyes and face) especially relevant for love.”
“In two studies, subjects induced to exchange mutual unbroken gaze for 2 min with a stranger of the opposite sex reported increased feelings of passionate love for each other.”
Oh and that overused phrase? “His eyes darkened.” Check this out:
“Should you choose to move closer, you and your gaze partner will find that eye contact also joins you to each other in another way, in a process known as “pupil mimicry” or “pupil contagion” – this describes how your pupils and the other person’s dilate and constrict in synchrony.”
Maybe it’s some kind of unconscious connection or simply a reaction to someone’s pupils dilating and literally darkening, but we are physiologically cued to see and respond to it.
Diving slightly deeper into the connection between people engaged in a gaze, we get into that woo-woo vibe. First is the question of recognition. “[E]ye gaze signals whether or not to impute minds into others.” Once there is an acknowledgement of mind, the gaze serves to assess “sameness” or “otherness” and even further, “mutual gaze leads to a kind of partial melding of the self and other: we rate strangers with whom we’ve made eye contact as more similar to us, in terms of their personality and appearance.” And for some, all these effects are too much–too intense, too overwhelming, too many ephemeral and confusing stimuli.
So what does that feeling “look” like on page?
Gooooood question. After all, the experience of perceiving and being perceived is fundamentally a mental-magic-energy-exchange high that kind of defies traditional “show don’t tell” symptom cataloging. See, e.g. The Tenth Insight: Holding the Vision, wherein James Redfield equates the act of paying attention to someone/listening, is the act of feeding energy to the “speaker”.
I want to preface this by saying I have not conducted an academically rigorous search for answers here. The excerpts I’m citing below are largely MMC/FMC romantic (or will become romantic) gazes written by women. And the observations I’m making are rough sketches of the gaze framework as it appears in published books. I am CERTAIN that I’m missing nuance in my analysis. Period. Full stop. And I’m equally certain that I’m not representing a wide enough or diverse enough sample size to draw definitive conclusions. All I can say is that I enjoyed each of these books, and because I liked the books and the authors, I was curious about what these successful authors did to convey the gaze. And I’m not over the moon about these gaze moments. If you have a favorite gaze moment from any book of any flavor, please please leave them in the comments.
Observation 1: In books where magic is involved (or there’s some kind of magical connection), the writer may convey the woowoo as almost a by-product of that magic or, conversely, the magical connection is an allegory or stand-in for the emotional impact of the gaze itself.
For example, in The Awakening of Ren Crown by Anne Zoelle, the MMC saves the FMC in the first chapter. Their meeting includes this:
“Heat centered in the hand pressing against my chest, and something electric and white hot shot through me.
The electricity connected and something in me—that part that felt neutralized, like a sleeping dragon—pulled greedily, demanding treasure and gold, knitting it together and throwing swashes of energy through my limbs like paint splattering a canvas. And all of a sudden, all I could see was blue. Two circles of ultramarine, the color straight from the deepest shade of The Last Judgment. Staring into those eyes, a winged henna design sketched itself slowly in my mind.”
In this case, the MMC heals her with magic and forges the connection between them, one that is capped off with the ultramarine eyes. Here, the magic slides in as a logical framework for the hallmarks of gaze. Conversely, in Ali Hazelwood’s The Bride, the gaze triggers a magical connection in the werewolf alpha MMC.
“I let my eyes pin his as I close it, which is how I see it all happen in real time.
Pupils, widening.
Brow, furrowing.
Nostrils, flaring.
He watches me like I’m something made of maggots and takes one deep breath, slow. Then another, sharp, the moment I’m delivered to the altar. His expression widens into something that looks, for an instant, indecipherably shaken, and I knew it, I knew that Weres didn’t like Vampyres, but this feels beyond that. It feels like pure, hard, personal contempt.”
Interestingly, the FMC doesn’t have that same magic mate-click. Her experience of the gaze occurs a bit sooner and is expressed as follows:
“Because my future husband hears it, and finally turns to me.
My stomach drops.
My step falters.
The murmurs quiet.
In the photo I was shown, the groom’s eyes looked an ordinary, unsurprising blue. But as they meet mine, I realize two things. The first is that I was wrong, and his gaze is actually an odd pale green that borders on white. The second is that Father was right: this man is very, very dangerous.”
In Storm Front, (and throughout the rest of the Dresden Files books) Jim Butcher presents the supernatural gaze and the antagonist gaze in “the soulgaze”–an invasive and painful seeing/understanding of another’s soul that a wizard has upon meeting the eyes of anyone else. The experience is not one of connection, but rather a forcible measuring of another that scars the wizard and lingers in their psyche.
“For the first time she forgot to keep her eyes averted from mine, and in that second, I saw inside of her.
Things seemed to slow down for a moment. I had time to see the color of her eyes, the structure of her face. To recognize where I had seen them before, why she had looked familiar to me. I had time to see, behind her eyes, the fear and the love that motivated every move she made, every step she took. I saw what had moved her to come to me, why she was afraid. I saw her grief, and I saw her pain.”
And where it is an antagonist:
“The first thing I felt was anger, anger at being manipulated, anger that he should presume to soulgaze upon me.
Just a second later, I felt scared to death of this man. I had looked on his soul and it had been as solid and barren as a stainless-steel refrigerator. It was more than unsettling. He was strong, inside, savage and merciless without being cruel. He had a tiger’s soul.”
Finally, where no magic is actively in play, but there is the potential for it, you usually get some allusion to the “power” behind the gaze. A good example is Ilona Andrews’ Silver Shark.
“His dark green eyes focused on her, reflecting a sharp, perceptive intellect. The eyes of a man who could be either very generous or completely ruthless. The man smiled, at once charming and reassuring, and she felt the power of his mind. It was like a typhoon held back, enclosed in a self-imposed cage.
It was too much. Every coping mechanism that had let her make it this far collapsed. She stared with no idea how to respond.
He was larger than life.
Lienne cleared her throat.
The sound shattered her trance. Claire closed her mouth.”
Here, both MCs have mental magic, and their minds “touch” during the gaze. The harnessed power the FMC describes behind the eyes and intellect is literally magic, but it’s not a magical connection. The mental magic simply explains how the FMC can see so much about the MMC without it becoming head-hoppy.
Ok, but what if there isn’t magic?
Observation 2: In books with no magic, the only consistency is to express it in a manner consistent with the voice of the character within the genre expectation.
In some cases, the gaze is diluted over the course of an entire meet-cute. There is no pregnant pause, no hiatus in action that marks the significance of the exchange. Rather, we get a whole cascade of (usually) awkward dialogue, movement, body language that signals its significance, and then some form of summary of its impact–either in the moment or in other chapters. For example, The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy by Megan Bannen, the original meet cute between the antagonists-to-lovers takes up a chapter mid-book in flashback. During the entirety of the scene the MMC is flustered and there is no one single “gaze” but if I had to pull a quote that comes close, it’s this:
“Her smile broadened, dimpling her cheeks, and those dimples in combination with the fact that she may or may not have caught him bawling all over her dog robbed him of speech. With each passing second that he stood there gawking at this ridiculously lovely woman in the lobby, his embarrassment, and the irritation that went with it, deepened.”
The MMC would summarize this experience in a different section as follows and has another gaze (one that doesn’t do the woowoo of a “gaze”).
“And it was exactly as it had been the day they met, with Mercy like sunshine personified in her yellow dress, and every thought Hart had ever had in the course of his life emptying out of his brain and vanishing into thin air.
His feet kept moving, and each step that brought him closer to Mercy made her big brown beautiful eyes go wider and wider behind her glasses, and then he was standing over her, and one thought finally took shape in his brain: I think I want this to be real.”
Another example of this dilution over the course of a meet-cute is in Talia Hibbert’s The Roommate Risk. Here, the MMC is admiring the FMC in a library. He is flustered throughout the observation, but the moment their eyes meet, this is the description:
“Jasmine Allen looked away from the window. She looked right at him. She smirked.
Rahul felt his cheeks heat. He raised a hand self-consciously to his hair, stopped himself, and pulled off his glasses instead. Now she was just a blur, and he couldn’t see the sharp amusement in those dark, dancing eyes. But he could still feel her gaze. Fuck.”
In both examples, the author zooms into the MMC’s voice/thoughts at the end to effectively emphasize the emotional drumbeat of the gaze. In multi-pov or not an in-close third, you might get something more like these sections from J. D. Robb’s Naked In Death:
“He looked straight ahead as the dirge swelled, then without warning, he turned his head, looked five pews back across the aisle and directly into Eve’s eyes.
It was surprise that had her fighting not to jolt at that sudden and unexpected punch of power. It was will that kept her from blinking or shifting her gaze. For one humming minute they stared at each other. Then there was movement, and mourners came between them as they left the church.
When Eve stepped into the aisle to search him out again, he was gone.”
And his reflection on the gaze a few pages later:
“Then he’d sensed something, something that had coiled his muscles, tightened his gut. He’d felt her gaze, as physical as a blow. When he’d turned, when he’d seen her, another blow. A slow motion one-two punch he hadn’t been able to evade.
It was fascinating.”
In these last four excerpts, there is very little in the way of physical movement. There is very little description of the person’s face or facial movements. It’s mostly telling as far as the emotional impact and usually that impact generates the movement (lack of blinking, stomach clenching, fidgeting, etc.) The characters in these samples experience “the moment” but don’t ascribe larger meaning to it or at least not yet. They just know there was woo-woo happening. And it happens SUPER FAST on page. A couple sentences. That’s it.
Observation 3: POV matters. That superfast “click” can become more pronounced if you have first person or close third.
Here’s a very voicey example of that comes from Ali Hazelwood’s Deep End.
“Also, why is he staring at me? Why am I staring back?
I can’t tear my gaze away, and I think it’s because of his eyes. They’re studious. Focused. Dialed in. Preternaturally blue. Somewhere in the Baltic Sea, a cod splashes through a patch of water that precise color, and—
Did Pen tell him about me? Did Pen tell him that she told me about him? Is that why Lukas looks so…I don’t know. Curious? Absorbed? Something.”
The advantage of something like this is it allows the narrator to misinterpret the gaze or to ascribe meaning to physical cues that guesses at the other party’s intention and may be incorrect (see the maggots example from The Bride.) It also brings you along with the narrator’s racing thoughts (or blank thoughts, depending). And yet, even in the FMC’s head, I’m just not sure I’m as steeped in the feels the same way a gaze in a movie makes it happen.
Observation 4: If your character doesn’t feel the power in a gaze that should be meaningful, share what they do notice and/or what meaning they do ascribe, or show us it’s overwhelming or uncomfortable.
For characters who don’t make eye contact or for whom a prolonged gaze either imparts no visceral emotion or imparts too much (and is therefore to be avoided), an author can nevertheless give us either some intellectualized interiority or an avoidance of gaze as an alternative. In Half a Soul by Olivia Atwater, we get several examples of this.
First, the FMC “sees” rather than “gazes.” In other words, she is caught by the picture in front of her rather than the ephemeral phenomenon of the gaze.
“His eyes were even stranger and more arresting up-close, so that Dora ended up staring up into them, appreciating the way that they danced with some faint inner light.
He blinked very slowly and languidly as she looked up at him.
‘I don’t believe you have,’ he said. If Dora wasn’t mistaken, in fact, he was briefly put-out by the fact that she hadn’t jumped into the air and screamed when he’d sneaked up on her.”
And then, a few pages later,
“Dora glanced up at him. Elias was watching her with an arched eyebrow, which confused her. His tone suggested that he was trying to be friendly, but if she wasn’t mistaken, his expression was one of faint disgust—oh.
I’m acting strangely again, Dora thought. She backed away from him quickly.”
In both these sequences, the FMC “sees” the eyes or the quirked eye brow and tries to interpret the emotion behind it in order to assess her own behavior. This is a feature of this neuro-divergent coded character. She approaches most other characters this way–the difference with the MMC comes out more over time. She expresses more curiosity, spends more time with him, likes his eyes, and, occasionally, struggles with the intensity behind his expression.
“Elias glanced down at her as they began, keeping his expression cool. This close, his golden eyes were even more arresting, and Dora found herself staring.”
“Elias came around the bench to stand in front of her. His golden eyes studied her in a penetrating manner, as though he were examining beneath the surface of her skin. Dora closed her arms over her chest, distantly uncomfortable beneath his gaze in a way that she had not been before, even while dressed in her underthings.”
On at least one occasion, she has to force herself to continue meeting his eyes. She sometimes feels the tugs on her heartstrings when he does something admirable-yet-intense to others. When she can’t interpret his expressions, she expresses her confusion or asks what he’s thinking. In her case, it’s only over time that she has physical/emotional symptoms connected to his gaze.
The bad news
I don’t have a prescription for what I consider to be a successful gaze scene. The examples I’ve given just don’t hit me in the feels as hard as the video. And maybe it’s the nature of the gaze to be only interpretable visually. Maybe this is as good as we get. I mean, type in “how to write an intense eye contact scene” and one of the top results is a reddit post that boils down to “don’t.”
Most of the time, advice references movies which is deeply unhelpful when we’re hamstrung by the need to use words to describe the thing that an actor just… does.
When you just focus on the emotional punch, it can read flowery, literary, overly romanticized. See, for example, The Song of Songs: v 9: “You have ravished my heart with one glance of your eyes.” And in Psalm 139: “The Hebrew word for gaze used in this particular passage is chaqar, meaning to see through into one’s innermost being. When the Psalmist cries, “you probe me and you know me” it is recognition that God looks deeply into his heart and understands all that he is.” “St. John’s Spiritual Canticle, illustrates the recognition of being beloved in verses 22-23: ‘And the look in my eyes pierced you. When you gazed at me in return, your eyes impressed their grace upon me. I felt so desired that my eyes were able to adore all they saw within you.’”
But then, if you focus too much on the mechanics, you lose the magic amidst the squints and frowns.
Overall, the consensus seems to be to pair some kind of eye-related movement or change with an accompanying emotion and hope that the pairing you picked evokes the visceral magic in a way that balances the literal with the woo-woo.
Is this free from criticism? Nope. Often, you get combos like “dark eyes radiating intelligence” or “studied with a predator’s unwavering attention.” And the question is always some variation of “how do eyes radiate?” Or “what does it mean that his eyes brightened/darkened/got a feral glint?” And don’t get me started on how which body movements we focus on as writers say as much if not more about our experiences and biases as the “observer/conveyor” as the characters we’re writing about. I don’t have the bandwidth to delve into gazing upon “the gaze” here.
Ultimately, we struggle for words to properly meld what we see–the eye movement–and what we perceive and experience–the emotional punch.
And I have never read anything that punched as hard as the Jin/Akin scene that started me down this path.