Fashion

I've never really been one for fashion, although I do thoroughly enjoy older fashion styles - Victorian to be specific - but I have slowly been learning a little bit about it as I have explored what I like to wear and how I like to look. It's a pretty foreign concept to me, which is probably a weird a dumb thing to say being in my twenties, but it really is. I've never spent any time thinking about how I look or what I wear, other than when I dress up in something extravagant and crazy, but that's a pretty special occasion that doesn't come around very often.

Unfortunately, this kind of thing has actually affected my writing over the years as well. Not knowing what looks good means not knowing how to describe what looks good. Not paying any attention to how I look means not knowing how to describe how I look. And not knowing how to describe how I look means not knowing how to describe how my characters look.

Descriptions have never really been my strong point, which is probably because I've never paid much heed to how you would describe something. I can say that things were blue or red, big or small, even say that something was beautiful. But if you asked me to describe what made that thing beautiful, I would have no idea of what to tell you. So to say why someone is handsome, intimidating, scary, beautiful, or entrancing really doesn't go much deeper than that. But it really should. A reader won't really believe that a character has that trait if you can't explain why it is. It's not like telling a joke or doing a magic trick. The point isn't to keep things hidden. The more you can put on the table, the easier it is for a reader to envision what you are giving them.

And in my case, I spend a lot of time talking about knights and royalty. Going into battle, doing espionage, hiding from adversaries, and even going to balls or other formal events. One's attire in these situations is incredibly vital, and I have a hard time describing it. It's problematic. It's not enough to say that the princess was wearing a red ballgown. I should be listing what it was made out of, what kind of designs it had, where the pieces of it fell, what jewelry she was wearing to accompany it, how she had done her hair and makeup. But I know absolutely nothing about any of these aspects. I just know that I have an image in my head, and for a long time, I just hoped that the actions the characters took and how they spoke would get across the descriptions of what I was thinking.

But that's not a wise way of doing things. It doesn't matter how good you are at writing, saying that they danced well doesn't tell you whether their shoes were black or white or blue. Saying that they looked out of place doesn't explain how. You can't expect to skip over a piece of the puzzle and have the other pieces fill the rest in. It's an all or nothing sort of deal. And I still have a lot of pieces to place.