So, some wise life advice for y'all: Don't be sick. Being sick is no fun.


Anyway, where were we? Oh right: how to describe clothing in fiction. This came up because there was a post going around Tumblr that listed 'paragraphs of clothing description' as one of the cardinal sins of bad writing, and then beccaelizabeth posted In defence of all those paragraphs about clothing: a cultural studies view, which is definitely worth a read, and the problem is, I agree with both of those.

Because clothing is important to your story, and also, there is nothing that makes me roll-eyes out of a story as fast as clumsy wall-o-text descriptions like that.

The same thing applies to other kinds of descriptions - if you want to want me roll-eyes out even faster, try doing it with paragraphs of descriptions of guns. That happens at least as often, although generally not in the same kind of books that do clothes. And then there's descriptions of food, of spaceships or steam trains, of scenery and nature, which I tend to be more tolerant of, but are just as easy to do a clumsily bad job on.

I'm going to stick with clothing in this post, because it's a pretty universal one, and because it gets the gendered complaining in a way the others don't, and because nearly all stories will have clothing appear at some point, but most of this applies to all sorts of things you might need to describe in a story.

Also, pls don't get the impression I actually have answers here, this is just me throwing out Thoughts.

( Thoughts )
( A Writing Exercise For Description )

...Anybody else wanna try that?