The baroque choreography of stage business

She looked up at him with a sigh, turned slightly in her chair, and reached for his hand as she leaned—wait, that's not the kind of choreography this article is about.

I never imagined that my training in choreography* would apply to story coaching and editing, yet here we are. Not many days pass that I’m not scraping some gobbet of stage business off the page so the character has room for a breath of interiority.

True, sometimes there’s not a lot of physical action in a given scene, and it’s helpful to give the charac…