Is Look the Right Word for Your Narrative?

Before you examine the following list, decide whether look is the word you need. Would something else be more appropriate for the situation? People can scowl, laugh, or hiccup. Even during romantic encounters, perhaps especially during romantic encounters, other body language might be more appropriate.

Could your protagonist point to something rather than look at it? Scowl at a salesman rather than look at him with an angry frown? Slurp steaming coffee and spit it all over herself rather than look at it and comment it’s probably too hot to drink?

If you’ve considered the alternatives and decided a visual is required, step right up, flex your creative muscles, and proceed to the next paragraph.

You can swap look with many of the words in the list that follows. Others need to be paired with eyes, gaze, or similar words.

For example, to use dig into, you could say “Jeremy’s eyes dug into Jolene, his stare fixing her for so long she felt like a butterfly pinned to a mounting board.” Some editors don’t like eyes that perform independent actions, but this technique can add character to your work if not overdone.

Maintain point of view. You can write “Jeremy admired Jolene” as long as you’re in Jeremy’s head. If your story is from Jolene’s point of view, you might have to convert the verb into an adjective and create a sentence like “Jolene basked in Jeremy’s admiring gaze.”

Look Alternatives

The words in this list are seeds. For those seeds to flourish and become creative masterpieces, you must water with ingenuity and fertilize with imagination.

A to C
admire, analyze, appraise, assess, audit, beam, behold, blink, bore, browse, canvass, compare, catch a glimpse of, catch sight of, check out, consider, contemplate, criticize, cross-examine

D to F
dig into, eagle-eye, evaluate, examine, explore, eye, eyeball, feast one’s eyes, ferret, fix, flash, flirt with, focus on, follow, frisk over

G
gander, gape, gawk, gawp, gaze, get a load of, give the once-over, glance, glare, glimmer, glimpse, gloat, glower, go through, goggle, grade, grill

H to O
hunt, inspect, interrogate, investigate, judge, lamp, lay eyes on, leaf through, leer, make eyes, make out, measure, monitor, moon, note, observe, ogle, outstare

P to R
pay attention to, peek, peer, peg, penetrate, perceive, peruse, pierce, pin, ponder, pore over, probe, pry, pump, question, quiz, rake, read, reconnoiter, regard, review, riffle, rivet, rubberneck

S and T
scan, scope, scout, scrutinize, search, see, sift, sight, size up, skim, spot, spy, squint, stalk, stare, study, surveil, survey, sweep, tackle, take a gander, take in, take notice, take stock of, track

V to Z
view, watch, weigh, wink, winnow, witness, zero in