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mbarkerWriting Excuses 20.12: Fashion as a Writing Metaphor
Key points: Howard is wearing clothes! Fashion and writing or storytelling: you do it every single day. What you wear is how you present yourself to the world. Fashion is instant language. What do you put on the page without thinking about it? Fashion is where the personal meets the cultural. Make one element interesting. Pick one thing, and make that interesting. Experiment, and ask for help! You don't have to do exactly what they suggest. Develop your taste. Take one thing off! Howard, put your pants back on! Know what your go-to items are, and why. What do you want people to feel at the end of your book? Use your tools with intent to build something exciting and dynamic.
[Season 20, Episode 12]
[Mary Robinette] Hey, guess what? The 2025 Writing Excuses Cruise is over 50% sold out. During this week-long masterclass, I'm going to be leading writers like yourself through a series of workshops designed to give you the tools to take your writing to the next level. Space is limited, but there is still time to secure your spot. We're going to be sailing out of Los Angeles from September 18th through 26. Regardless of where you are in your writing journey, this event is yoru opportunity to learn new skills while exploring the beautiful Mexican Riviera. Whether you're revising a story, reworking a character arc, or revitalizing your plot, you'll leave more confident in your current story and bolstered by a new set of friends. Join us on board at writingexcuses.com/retreats.
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
[Season 20, Episode 12]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] Fashion as a Writing Metaphor.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] And I'm wearing clothes.
[DongWon] So...
[Mary Robinette] Thank god.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] We all are grateful for that fact. So, this episode, we are returning to the little mini-series that we're doing throughout this season of different personal metaphors for how we think about the process of writing and storytelling. I was excited this episode to talk about how I think about fashion and why I think that's a useful metaphor for approaching writing. So there's a few things I want to hit here. But the first thing I want to start with is I think fashion and writing, or fashion and storytelling, are very similar in one very specific way. Which is that whether you know it or not, you are already doing this every single day of your life. Right? It's… You are writing emails. You are sending text messages. You are al… Communicating with the people around you. You're telling stories to your family, to your friends. You are also getting dressed every day. Now, this doesn't mean necessarily that you are putting on an outfit and participating in the general broader culture of fashion in an intentional and deliberate way. In the same way that sending an email to your boss is not you writing fiction or telling a story in the same intentional way that you would be if you were pursuing this for publication. There's lots of reasons to put clothes on your body. There's lots of reasons to put text on a page.
[Howard] Kind of the difference between ordering a pizza and standing up and reading a poem. There's… Ordering a pizza on the phone. Okay, as anybody done that in the last 10 years? I don't know. But, I mean, you have that conversation and there's a base minimum of information that needs to be transmitted and you're just going to transmit it and be done. But if you're standing up at open mic night in the poetry club… I've never been to one of those. Are those even things?
[Chuckles]
[Howard] But there's a lot more intent in what's… What you're saying.
[DongWon] Yes, those are real things, for the record, but… Yes. People do do exactly what you're saying.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] But it's kind of going back to the episode about cooking as well. The difference between doing it for subsistence, doing it for everyday purposes, versus doing it for… With intention, with a reason why you're engaging with it.
[Mary Robinette] One of the things about that for me is that whether or not you intend something, you're still communicating.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Mary Robinette] There is this quote by Miuccia Prada which I have loved for years, which is, "What you wear is how you present yourself to the world. Fashion is instant language." One of the places that we see this most is actually in the area of privilege. That somebody who is, like a CEO, can come into the office in jeans, but somebody who's angling for a raise cannot. So, if you're getting up and saying, yeah, it doesn't matter what I put on. It doesn't matter to you because it doesn't affect the way you move through the world. But someone else who does not have the same standing, the same other societal pressures on them, cannot make the same choices. So whether or not you're intending to make a statement, you're still making a statement.
[DongWon] Well, one of the reasons I wanted to bring fashion as the metaphor for this episode was I truly love fashion. I love designer clothes, in terms of, like, seeing what's going on in the fashion scene, what's going on in the world of design. But how I dress myself is also a point of interest, but also difficulty and pain. Right? One thing I do want to emphasize is just because we're talking about fashion, a lot of us have very different relationships to clothing at different points in our lives for different reasons. It is hard to dress yourself in a way that makes you feel good and excited to go out the door. It's hard to find a thing that feels natural to your form of expression and meets the expectations of all the people around you. Right? I just really want to emphasize that as were talking about this, that there's an easy and fun to fashion, it's also very challenging. I am someone who's made an interest out of dressing myself for a lot of reasons. Some of those were about assimilation and blending in. And as I've come out as queer and as I've transitioned, having to learn a whole new language for how to dress has been a particular challenge for me and an ongoing one. Learning how to speak those languages, learning how to approach that, made fashion into a thing that I… Instead of something that I was doing by reflex, to something I was doing by intention and deliberateness to figure out how to communicate certain things that I wanted to communicate.
[Mary Robinette] For me, what you're saying about the… Something that I'm doing out of reflex. I want to bring us to how this works extremely well as a metaphor for prose. We talk about transparent prose. Transparent prose is a fashion. Like, right now, transparent prose in the United States is that you sound like you're a 30-year-old white guy. Jane Austen was riding transparent prose in her day. But if you drop one of her books down in front of most people, it's… There are parts of it that are impenetrable. When I was writing the Glamorous Histories series, one of the things that I would always do is I would put, just to amuse myself, I would put an unaltered sentence from Jane Austen in every novel, and without fail, my editor, my copy editor, and the proofreader would all flagged that sentence as awkward. And, beside the great satisfaction of saying stet…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] To Jane Austen, it highlighted for me the fact that even though I was trying to write in Austenian English, it was still… I was still… My fashion was still rooted in the 21st-century. When you put something in another time period, that was transparent prose in her day, it is awkward now. So, for me, when I'm thinking about writing, I am thinking about what things am I putting on the page without thinking about it?
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] If you don't read the language, you'll struggle to speak the language. If you don't understand the language, it's very difficult to use the language. As we're recording this episode, just today, we got off of Navigator of the Seas, the Royal Caribbean cruise ship, and you might think, well, all the passengers are wearing clothing that's… Some of its fancy and some of its casual and whatever, but there is a very specific language being spoken among the crewmembers where there are very small indicators of rank and position. I could tell that, wait, the ones in the white shirts are generally the bosses of a given area, and the ones in the colored shirts are the ones who are reporting to the bosses. But I didn't know where to look for pins or stripes or whatever to tell rank. But for them, that fashion really is instant language. At a glance, they know where a person stands on the ladder of rank in the ship.
[Mary Robinette] We do this all the time. I mean, if anyone has ever gone to a convention, you can immediately tell who the science-fiction people are, and it's hard to explain why. I mean, sometimes it is because there wearing a shirt that, in the Star Wars font, that says Metal Fours Be with You.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Metaphors be with you. It's just amazing. Sorry, I did actually read that as metal fours.
[Laughter]
[Erin] We were going with it.
[Mary Robinette] But when I'm thinking about fiction, it is again, like, what are the signals that I'm sending? I often think about the fashion of it. Like, is this a dressy occasion?
[DongWon] Yeah. I think that evolves over time, and those can be sort of genre indicators as well.
[Erin] One of the things I really like in thinking about fashion is that it's where the personal meets the cultural.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah…
[Erin] You know what I mean? Like, your… There's your own expression of identity, as we go through the year, one thing we've been talking about is the lens of who, and we will be getting to the lens of setting. In some ways, fashion is right where those two hit. Because there is… Fashion is influenced by the cultural norms around you, but also the cultural norms you bring with you. What you may believe to be a formal dress is not… For some reason, I'm thinking of Downtown Abbey and, like, all the shame of wearing a… What we would consider to be a very formal tuxedo, because they only wore white ties, where it was like an all white outfit, and wearing a black dress coat was, like, who would ever do that?
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] I believe… You're looking at me as if no.
[Mary Robinette] No. White tie means that literally your tie is white.
[Erin] Sorry.
[Mary Robinette] But it was with tails. It's okay. Sorry.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] I just…
[Erin] I do not know the language of what we were just talking about, as we can tell. But, like, I think what's important is that, like, what does that culture has shifted.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Someone who comes down in a full tuxedo right now, you're thinking they must be at a wedding or going to a particular type of special occasion in a particular culture as well. So, in stories, even when you're not thinking about the character's fashion, how is the way that they would express themselves constrained, redefined, or experienced by the culture around them?
[DongWon] Well, it's also how your personal is reshaped and changed by what you are wearing to the occasion. Right? So if you show up in a T-shirt and shorts to the wedding, then that's going to communicate a very different thing about who you are and what your expectations are in arriving at that event. In the same way that if you're trying to write a horror story and you're putting bunnies and ponies in it that are all lovely and fluffy, that everyone's a little bit like, hey, this… You may not be bringing the correct language to this particular genre expectation that you're meeting here. Right? So, the expectations that people have around what the event is and what clothing is appropriate are kind of useful to think about as you're thinking about what story you're trying to tell and how you want to tell it. And with that, let's take a pause for a moment, and when we come back, we'll get a little bit more into how you can begin to dress yourself with intent.
[DongWon] So, before we started recording, I made all of my fellow podcasters watch a TicTok with me that is a TicTok sound that I very much enjoy because it mostly is just people cycling through a bunch of great outfits, and I learned a lot from it and get a lot of inspiration from it. But the sound itself is talking about ways to think about putting a good outfit together. Right? And the sound goes, if it's not interesting by color, it needs to be interesting by shape. If it's not interesting by shape, it needs to be interesting by texture. If it's not interesting by texture, it needs to be interesting by color. Right? So it's sort of highlighting how you have these different elements that you can pull from, that whenever you have a story or piece of fiction, it needs to stand out in one of several different ways. Right? The voice needs to be interesting, the thematic elements need to be interesting, it needs to be hitting a certain genre expectation. Right? Understanding what your broad tools are that you can use to pull a reader in is really, really important.
[Howard] Years ago, I was the toastmaster at a couple of conventions. I realized that the most important tool in my toolbox for being a toastmaster was a tuxedo. Because when… And, yeah, there's a measure of privilege in here. When the white guy in a tuxedo steps on stage and picks up the microphone, I didn't need to say anything, everybody just went quiet. Because it signaled to the whole room that something was about to begin. I don't speak fashion very well, but I knew that piece of syntax and I knew how to use it.
[DongWon] It was interesting by shape in that case. Right? The silhouette you're presenting communicated something very clear to us, which is, fancy person in charge. Right?
[Dan] One of the things that I loved about that little TicTok clip that you showed us is that it uses the word interesting instead of the word good.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Dan] It's not saying that you have to be perfect in any of these areas, it's not saying you have to be good in any of these areas, just be interesting in one of them. Obviously, your writing needs to also be good. That's what people want to read. But being interesting in your voice, being interesting in your perspective, in your technology or your magic, whatever it is that you're talking about. Find something that is going to grab attention and be interesting.
[Mary Robinette] It doesn't have to be interesting in all of those things.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] The… You can pick one thing that you love, that you are fascinated by, and set it against the relatively neutral background and it'll pop. So you can focus things that way when you're building. Whether it's building an outfit for yourself or thinking about a story that your writing. It doesn't have to be an original voice and an original plot and original characters. It can just be one of those things.
[DongWon] Well, what I also like about it is… One thing… When I see people start to dress themselves, and they're trying to figure out how to be interesting and distinctive and how to have intent in presenting themselves, the first thing they reach for is color. Right? So, often you see teens, young people, when they're first starting to figure out how do I look like a person, they'll be like bright colors, dark colors, whatever it is. Right? That's why we see, like… We talk about, like, teen Goths so much because they learned that if I dressed all in black, I can appear a certain way and be of a certain community and have certain expectations versus neons versus pastels, all of those things.
[Mary Robinette] [garbled] the eighties was rough.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] Yeah. Exactly. Describing all those things is really useful, but then what I really love is thinking… Reminding myself and reminding other people that there are other tools in your kit, too. Right? You don't just have voice. You don't just have character.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] You don't just have this, that, and the other. I'm currently wearing a monochromatic outfit, I'm wearing all black, but in three different textures. So I think about that when I get dressed. I was like, oh, if I'm having this linen top, then I want sort of something a little more billowy flowy on pants, and then I want those leather boots to go with it. Right? So, learning to think about the different tools in your kit and reminding yourself that, oh, this scene isn't working because I'm just trying to lean into the action of it and it's falling flat because all I have is a single note of action. What else can I lay into it? Where's the texture, where's the color, where's the shape?
[Mary Robinette] I think this is also something else that happens to people is that they are afraid to experiment and they're looking for someone to tell them what is correct, and also afraid to ask for help. So it's this weird thing that will happen to people. I went through. Where I had… My body had changed shape and I didn't know how to dress myself anymore. So actually went to a… And again, it was at a point in my life where I could afford this, I went to a shopper and asked for help understanding what looked good on my body. That was all I needed. I didn't have to keep going back to that same thing. I think when you're writing, that this is what workshops do for you. Like, how does this work? And you don't have to always… You don't have to do exactly what they tell you, like, sometimes she would show me something and I'm like, no.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] That's sending a signal that is very not me. Even if it looks good on my body, it does not match my personality.
[DongWon] Yes. Well, that's why when I showed this to everyone, Howard, you had a really interesting response where you said this keep saying interesting. And we had to flag that is a good thing about this, but your reaction was I don't know what interesting means in this case.
[Howard] Yeah.
[DongWon] And one thing I want to emphasize as we're talking about how to dress yourself with intent, how to engage with fashion, and how to engage with writing, the most important thing you have to do in all of this is to develop taste. Right? Not necessarily good taste. That doesn't mean that you have to be agreeing with the high arbiters of… Who award the Pulitzer Prize. But it does mean you have to have a taste. And that is a personal perspective that you're bringing to what clothes you're putting on your body, what words you're putting on the page.
[Dan] I want to change the topic just slightly. I teach a class about how to write thrillers. Which is a very small kind of spare style of writing. I use a Coco Chanel quote all the time when I teach it, which is, "Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off." This idea kind of goes back to what we're talking about texture or shape or color… What are the tools in your toolbox? You don't need to use them all. You probably don't want to use them all. Trim back. Be a little spare, a little lean. Especially when you're writing something like a thriller.
[Howard] I have two reactions to that. The first reaction is Coco Chanel looking at me and saying, "No. No, no, Howard! Put the pants back on!"
[Laughter]
[Howard] Take something else off. But the second response is that when we were studying… When I was studying music and we were looking at arrangements, we were told the sound of one violin is very, very interesting. The sound of two violins is fighting. You want one violin or you want several. If they're all going to be playing the same note. A string quartet, yeah, that's another thing. But it was this idea that if it's too interesting into many ways, then the things fight and we lose focus. So, yeah, Coco Chanel, look in the mirror, take one thing off.
[DongWon] It's the power of editing. Right? Is what she's fundamentally talking about. Right? Editing in terms of removing the one to many things that's on the plate, removing the one to many things in the outfit. It's the… Where the idea of kill your darlings comes from. Right? That may be your favorite ring that you're wearing. But it's a different metal tone than everything else you're wearing, and it's clashing. Or it's a different shape, and it's clashing. You take it off, it'll just look so… That much cleaner. And take it from something that feels costumey to something that feels fashion.
[Mary Robinette] It also helps you focus. It helps you say, this is the thing that's important.
[DongWon] Right.
[Erin] I also think it's interesting to think about, like, what your go to… Maybe this is just me, but, like, I have things in my closet that I wear all the time. Like, you know what I mean? It's like… I got like 20 things, but, like, these three are, like, if you see me, you probably see me in one of those. Because I like them the most, they feel the most comfortable. They're the hardest, I think, the same, like, to get rid of, if I'm like, oh, these don't fit the occasion. But, like… But I love them. So I'm thinking similarly in writing, like, what are the things that you go to over and over again, and then what is it about them, so that if you're… Like, if I decide, like, I love all these casual T-shirts, but I have to go to a formal event, they will not work. What is it that I like about them? Is it the shape? Is it the color? Do you know what I mean?
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Is it the texture? If it's the texture, how can I find texture in a different form? So, thinking about some of the tools that you use, like, even if it's not the tool… If your darling won't work for this particular piece, maybe it will work… Like, maybe something about the reason that it is your darling can be found elsewhere in that story.
[DongWon] Well, that's why I like talking about taste. It's like… Taste is almost this taboo thing to talk about in a certain way, because there's so… That's… It's so loaded with a certain valence of, like, good taste, bad taste. It's just like…
[Howard] In poor taste.
[DongWon] Yeah. Exactly. But really, all taste is is having a point of view. It's having a perspective. It's coming from a place in how you think about your dress, how you think about what you're interested in. Or which kind of stories you're interested in. The only way to develop your taste is to find out what you like. Right? And, like, read more, consume more books, consume more stories. Look at more people wearing clothes and think about why did they decide to dress that way?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Going back to the thing that we were talking about at the beginning with that Prada quote, that it is about how you present yourself. Often, fashion as it changes… Because fashion appears in clothing and music and architecture. It's often about that communicating this is the community that I belong to, and also, this is where I am in a power structure. It's frequently driven by a [garbled hierarchical?] story in some form or another, which is one of the reasons that you'll see people, I think, when they are like, well, I write literary fiction. I will discard all of the pieces of science fiction unless I put them on as costume. That's one of the reasons that I think science fiction writers get so mad when they see a literary person whose using science fiction tropes and does not understand how they work. It's one of the problems when you're seeing people putting on another culture as a costume. It's because they don't understand how it communicates to… And it's saying, I belong to a community that they don't belong to, whether it's in fiction or real life. It's also not understanding how things connect.
[DongWon] If you haven't taken the time to develop your taste in that thing, then you'll show up in costume and everyone'll will be like, oh, you don't go here.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] And we can tell.
[Erin] And, I think, on the other side, like… I'm reminded of a sort of comparison is the thief of joy. Which is, I remember finding out a while ago that, like, every famous person has their clothes tailored, and also just a lot of people in the world, like, their clothes are tailored to fit their body exactly after they buy them. So when you have bought something off the rack and walk out and are like, how come this is not flowing to my body the way it is when I see other people walking through the world, you don't know what they've done to their clothes between the moment they acquired them and the moment that they're actually out there. I think that, similarly, to like if you compare somebody's tenth book to the thing that you just wrote today, and you're like, well, why is there thing so perfect and mine is so messy. It's your at a different point, you haven't done the same things, you haven't tailored in the same way. Maybe you are still developing your taste and they've had longer to think about and develop theirs. So when you do that direct comparison, it isn't… They're not better, they're just using the tools differently.
[DongWon] And also, pro tip for the audience, it takes so much less money to get stuff tailored than you think it does.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] You probably think it's hundreds of dollars. It's like 15 to 20. Like, it's worth it in a lot of times. But, kind of going to what you're saying, I've seen people be so incredibly fashionable, the coolest outfits I've ever seen, and they have assembled that for under 30 dollars at thrift stores. I've seen people who are incredibly stylish, incredibly cool, and that's a 5000 dollar outfit that they're wearing. There's, like, a leveling effect to that, because their ability to bring their perspective to what clothes they're putting on their body is the thing that's equating them, not how much money they're able to spend. So, you can be a completely self-taught writer who grew up doing fanfiction and be delivering some of the most impactful narrative experiences out there or you could have an MFA and a PhD under your belt and be delivering the same effect. Right?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. When I see people, I'm interested in what they're communicating to me about themselves.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Sometimes I see people and I think what you're communicating to me is that you are expensive.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Mary Robinette] Sometimes I read books, and I'm like, mmm, you're communicating to me that you are expensive. You just feel, you want to feel fancy. I see this… unh, sometimes it's in published stuff, but a lot of times in early career writers, I'll ask them, like, how do you want people to feel at the end of this book? You can tell that what they want, and sometimes they actually voice it, is they want the reader to think that they are clever. I'm like, that's not…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] That is almost never going to work out the way you want it to work out.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah.
[DongWon] That feels like somebody wanting me to know that this is designer, not that I thought about how these lapel ratios work with my shoulders.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Like, I think, those are a different type of conversation that you could be having.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Someone recently asked me if I liked her sweater, which was weird. But then I was like, yeah, it seems… They then proceeded to tell me the providence of the sweater, instead of telling me what they liked about it.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] I'm like, I don't actually care where it came from or what line it's in. I am interested in the textures and why… What I had asked was what do the numbers mean on it?
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] They then proceeded to tell me about the providence instead of like, why they had a personal connection to it. Like, why did you pick this?
[DongWon] I think that really comes back to the core reason I wanted to talk about fashion is, for me, what clothes you put on your body, what stories you tell, it all comes down to intent. If you're approaching whatever it is you're doing with the intent, you can take any of the tools available to you and build something really exciting out of it and do something really dynamic with it. If you are going for the easiest off-the-shelf option, just because everyone else is doing it, then that's always going to be a little less interesting to me. Right? Learning to develop your taste for what's exciting to you and learning to develop that sense of intent toward your craft is very challenging, but also, I think, really, really rewarding once you start figuring out how to do that.
[DongWon] With that, I have a little bit of homework for you to start figuring out how to do this. That is, I want you to go to your closet and take one article of clothing that you love. It can be a T-shirt, it can be a pair of pants, it can be a belt, whatever it is. Take a thing that you love from your closet. Now I want you to build three different outfits around that. Build an outfit that you would wear just out on the street, going to the grocery store, going to the coffee shop, whatever it is you do on your day-to-day. What's an everyday version of that? Now, take that same article of clothing, and think about going to a family dinner at your parents' house, that all your aunts and uncles and cousins and everybody is coming to. What does that look like? Now, take that same article of clothing and incorporate it into an outfit that you'd go out for a night out on the town with your people, whether that's your friends, your date, whatever it is. Think about how that same article of clothing, that same tool, can serve you in these different genres, these different audiences. Then start thinking about what in your fiction works that way?
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. Thanks. It has pockets.
[Chuckles]
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