Small physical actions characters perform during dialogue or between story beats - fidgeting, pouring a drink, folding laundry - that make scenes feel alive.
Stage business refers to the minor physical activities characters engage in during a scene, especially during conversations. It's the coffee being stirred, the pen being clicked, the jacket being zipped up. Borrowed from theater, where actors need something to do with their hands, stage business in fiction serves the same grounding purpose - it keeps characters embodied, gives dialogue scenes texture, and often communicates subtext that the words themselves don't carry.
Stage business is what separates a scene that reads like a screenplay from one that reads like life. When a character methodically tears a napkin into strips while insisting everything is fine, the reader understands what's really happening. These small actions do double duty: they prevent talking-heads syndrome and they reveal character psychology without you having to spell it out.
Stevens constantly busies himself with butler duties - polishing silver, adjusting place settings - while navigating devastating emotional conversations, and the precision of his tasks mirrors his emotional repression.
Carver's characters are always doing something with their hands during dialogue - drinking, smoking, handling small objects - and these actions carry the emotional weight his spare dialogue leaves unspoken.
Walter White's breakfast scenes use the mundane business of cooking eggs and pouring juice to create unbearable tension when the audience knows what he's hiding.
If every character in every scene sips coffee and nods, your stage business has become wallpaper. Vary the activities and make them specific to the character and situation.
A character casually making a sandwich during a life-or-death conversation can work if you're going for dark comedy or detachment. Otherwise, match the business to the emotional temperature.
Write the same two-person conversation three times. In the first version, set it at a dinner table and use the food, utensils, and napkins as stage business. In the second, set it during a long car ride and use the driving, the radio, and the window as business. In the third, set it while one character packs a suitcase. Notice how the physical activity changes the rhythm, subtext, and emotional feel of the exact same dialogue.