How To Describe Clothing In Fiction

[melannen]

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.

It's something I've been thinking about a lot lately, though, because it's one of the writing skills that's actually very different in fanfic and original fic. In fanfic, the writer can assume that their audience already has a visual image of the main characters, and has a pretty good impression of the kind of clothes they wear. So to the extent that you may put description in the story mostly to give the reader a sort of sensory grounding, you can skip over a lot of it, because the reader already has that impression carried over from canon. (Or, if they're the sort of reader who reads fic they don't know the canon for, you can assume that they're a reader who's used to diving in the deep end and not knowing stuff.)

Even if it's a massive AU that transfers the characters to a completely different milieu where the same clothing cues won't apply, the readers still will be coming into it with a pretty good opinion of the sort of stuff the characters would wear in that milieu, the sort of cultural cues they'd be giving off. So in fanfic you really only need to describe clothing if there's something about it that's going to make it stand out, in terms of plot or characterization, from what's already established in canon.

(With OCs in fanfic, of course you don't have that, so the issues are a little different, but it's still not quite the same as writing OCs in original fiction where the reader has no descriptive orientation at all, coming in.)

Which isn't to say you can't do lots of descriptive passages in fanfic, but for a writer like me, who if left to herself would probably leave out all the sensory grounding details altogether, fanfic is nice, because I can just not worry about that in the same way. I'm the person who watched the first Harry Potter movie and was super-surprised to find out Draco Malfoy was blond. I'm the person who half the time can't describe the clothing on the person I was looking at thirty seconds ago. I'm the person who would much rather read, and write, "he was dressed for a mission" or "she was in her casual-day clothes", and fill in the details for myself, than get a play-by-play of the outfit. The last story I wrote for my last creative writing workshop, I deliberately put in no character description at all, just to see if they would notice. (They didn't, but that's not saying much.)

But not everyone agrees. Some people legitimately like a lot more sensory grounding than I want in a story, and that's valid. And if you move from fanfic to original fic, you start needing a lot more, just to establish your characters and world, and get that sensory grounding in there, so readers don't feel like they're floating in an empty void with occasional dialogue boxes or disembodied cups of tea.

So. How do you do that without ending up with paragraphs of description that everyone will be annoyed by?

The sort of ballpark guide I came up with is that you have to balance a bunch of different factors, like so:

-What the POV character knows about clothing
-What the POV character notices about clothing
-What the reader knows about clothing
-What the reader needs to know about clothing
-What the author knows about clothing
-What the author wants to tell about clothing

These will never all be the same. But to make it work naturally, you have to find the area of overlap, and write toward that. (If there's no area of overlap, you probably need to change one of the factors.)

The factors about what people know are maybe the simplest, but that's because they're also the least elastic.

You the writer can't change what your audience is going to know coming in. You can read all the Tumblr diagrams about names for different necklines that you want, but if your readers don't know what a "sweetheart" neckline is, then it won't do any good to use it in a description. You can go to an archaeology seminar on medieval underwear, but if your readers aren't going to believe that there were sports bras in the 14th century, all the citations in the world won't help you as a fiction writer. And you can worldbuild in detail all the different traditional designs for your five fantasy cultures, but if your readers don't know what "Numenor" is, mentioning "Numenorean patterns" will not help them at all.

And, of course, in some cases, different readers will have different levels of knowledge. If half your readers are super-interested in fashion, they will want to know the designer of that expensive wool coat, and will get annoyed if you just call it an "expensive designer coat". If the other half could care less about fashion, you might as well be throwing in a fantasy word with lots of apostrophes. And if you try to cater to the knowledgeable readers but pick the wrong designer, you've lost both sets. (on the other hand, you may get middle-of-the-road readers who want the texture of decadence that naming rich designers gives the story but wouldn't know Versace from Annatar.)

There's also the question of what connotations your readers will bring in, and that's even trickier, because it changes over time, and sometimes really rapidly - the outfit that signals "height of fashion" or "really deep in really specific subculture" when you're writing might not mean that even a couple years later, and definitely won't fifty years later, and even if your readers know that it's a period piece, they won't get the subtle signals. Even for current readers, that stuff can be a lot more regional or limited to a specific culture than you might think - if you dress a character in a specific way that's supposed to signal lower-class and tasteless, you had better hope most of your readers don't think it means glamorous and daring. Even in fantasy/SF/historical fiction, this applies more than you might think - something that most current readers in your genre take for granted as an invisible worldbuilding shortcut might read as gratingly dated and cliched in five years, and might be utterly opaque to someone unfamiliar with the genre.

There are ways to get around this - to educate your readers as you go. This ranges from the clumsy obvious way, a glossary or preface or As-You-Know-Bob or Victor-Hugo-style digression on the topic; to the subtle-not-subtle way of defining as you go - "a sweetheart neckline that curved around her bosom in the shape of a heart", "bright, jagged Numenorean stripes in reds and greens and yellows"; to the even subtler ways of worldbuilding that are worked in so slowly I can't write a short example. But the base of all of that is figuring out how much you expect your readers to already know coming in, and writing to that level.

And that's interconnected, of course, with the question of what you as the writer know. If you know nothing about fashion and don't really care to learn, then trying to write about clothing in detail and use it to make subtle story points is a bad idea. This can apply both to real-world and secondary worlds too: the two original worlds I'm working in right now, one of them I've been worldbuilding in since I was twelve, and have a pretty good idea of what the material culture is like, and have art of all the main characters in five different outfits and the personal and cultural history of each piece of each outfit. The other one, I started the story knowing basically just that it was a low-technology secondary-world fantasy and I'd figure it out as I went. In that one, so far I have established that my MC is wearing a blouse, a skirt, and orthopedic boots, and another character is wearing something with loose sleeves, although I may end up changing that to something sleeveless in revisions, and that's literally all I know about the clothing in this world.

So obviously that's going to affect how I write the description in these worlds.

This is also something you the writer can change, of course, by doing research and paying attention and learning things, and doing worldbuilding exercises and so on, but it's harder to change how much you care about it. And learning just enough to get things more spectacularly wrong or write yourself into a corner can be worse than just understanding and accepting the level of knowledge you're at, and writing to that level.

That's actually what I see go wrong most often, with this factor: people who think they know a lot more than they do. Such as the stereotypical teenage Mary Sue writer, who writes reams of descriptions of everyone's clothing, but it's all as if everyone in the universe had the same opinions on clothing as an American high school student. But you see it in other places too: getting specialized terminology wrong, missing the mark completely on class or regional or subculture fashions, someone who is clearly writing based on the clothes people wear on TV (or, for historicals, in fashion plates) rather than in Real Life, fantasy writers who contradict themselves or write something that makes no sense for the rest of the world, and so on. It's usually better to vague it up than to get it wrong in a way that'll confuse your readers.

So I'd say for this factor, more important than doing research is having a good handle on what exactly you do know, and then picking a style etc. and a POV/voice that will work with your level of knowledge.

Which brings us to: what does your POV character know? It doesn't matter if you and your reader both understand what a sweetheart neckline is, if your POV character has never worn anything but jeans and t-shirts and she aggressively doesn't care, or if zie is from a culture that does not have shirts, much less sweetheart necklines. On the other hand, if your POV character is the fashion director for the royal family, he had better be using those specialist terms correctly, picking up on all the subtlest connotations of dress, and recognizing every coat by its designer.

This is something that if it's working well - if your POV character's knowledge lines up well with what you need to say and what you know and the presumed reader's level - it's super-smooth and makes everything easier. If it doesn't, then it either makes things a lot harder, or it leads to the sort of clumsy, ooc descriptive paragraphs that make people hate the whole idea. So it's important to keep an eye on that.

You can, to some extent, finesse what your character knows to fit what you need them to know (or not know)-- part of that is picking your POV character wisely from the start, but that doesn't always work; sometimes you need a certain kind of character for other reasons. You can squeeze that a little, though - maybe your rough-and-tough masculine truck driver reads fashion magazines for fun, maybe your ultra-fashionable style-setter only knows what she likes and doesn't pay attention to the industry. But at some point you will have squeezed it too far, and nobody will believe that they know the thing. Or don't know the thing. At that point, you can give them amnesia. Or a knowledgeable friend to tell them things.

And that takes us to: what does your POV character notice. This is not the same thing as what they know. You can have a character who spent eight years in fashion college, knows all the terminology, burnt out on it, and no longer cares about anything but whether people are naked or not. You could have somebody who cares a lot about clothes and notices everything, but they're in an unfamiliar culture and don't know how to interpret what they notice. And everything in between.

This is one that's a lot easier to vary - someone might be extremely observant at some times and in some situations, and the opposite of observant in others. The place where this goes wrong, usually, is when what a character notices has more to do with what the author wants to describe than what makes sense for the character: if a POV character suddenly starts paying more or less attention to something, readers will look for meaning in that. Is the bystander whose clothes they're describing in unusual detail therefore dressed oddly, in a plot-relevant way? Is the fact that they always describe Character A's clothes and nobody else's supposed to mean that they're attracted to Character A? Is a character who's been describing every outfit they put on down to the buttons, and suddenly stops, supposed to be in some kind of emotional distress? Even if readers aren't consciously doing this, they'll do it subconsciously.

Varying what a character notices is a really useful and versatile tool for everything from laying the groundwork for solving a mystery to showing emotional states to basic establishing of character to lazy author tricks. But if you screw it up - especially by having a character suddenly start paying attention for no particular reason except that the author wanted to describe something - it can be super jarring as well.

And that brings us to what the reader needs to know. Which has a bunch of different aspects. The most important is plot. If you're writing a murder mystery that hinges on whether somebody was wearing a certain piece of jewelry, you had better work that into your description. And you'd better have that fit in naturally enough with the rest of your description, and what your POV character notices, that it doesn't stand out like a giant flashing light. There's subtler versions of this: if somebody's role in the story depends on them being from out of town, and everybody knowing they're a stranger because of how they dress, you need to put that in. Or if somebody's main character note is that she's self-conscious because she can't afford nice clothes, you need to make it clear what nice clothes are and what she's wearing that isn't that. And so on.

There's also the bit that I always forget about, which is that some people just want to know what the characters are wearing, because it bothers them if they can't get a good image going. So this one's wobblier - your fashion consultant character is going to give much more detailed descriptions than your don't-care work-at-home fantasy writer who thinks if it doesn't involve a hooded cloak it's pointless. But even if it's IC for your POV character to pay a lot of attention to that stuff, at some point most of your readers will start going "I really didn't need to know that." And even if it's IC for your POV character to not care, at some point most of your readers will want some kind of sensory grounding as to what the characters are wearing, even if it's super vague. So there's a balance there, in how much you need, how much you can get away with, and when you need to start taking control as an author.

And that brings us to the last one, which is what you as the writer want to tell people. I find with me, this varies a lot story to story: so in my two examples, I don't have a very good sensory grounding in the play-it-by-ear world, so as long as I get over the minimum necessary info for the plot and characters, I don't really care. And I'm going for an overall feel in the story that's a little bit detached from the physical, so I want that as well. In the other one, though, I'm super-invested in what these characters are wearing and what it means to them, and their world is also a really vivid sensory experience for me, rich with lots of material culture, and I want to share it with the readers. So even if I had plot and characters for whom clothing was irrelevant, I as writer want to put in a lot more description for this story, because I want it to feel lapidary and tapestried rather than foggy and comfortable like world #1.

And some writers in general really like writing long descriptive passages, or find it's an easy way to add word count or verisimilitude. And some really hate it and find it really difficult and like a story to feel spare. And both of those things are valid - there's a fair amount of flexibility for the style a writer likes to work in, as long as they keep the other factors in mind.

And then of course you also get to decide when and where to put the description into your story, and whether to do huge chunks or tiny bits and pieces smoothly working into the rest of the text.

So there you go! How to obsess way to much over writing description correctly rather than just writing the damn thing, by melannen.

Anyway, I've been having fun, as a writing exercise, with writing the same description as if I was only worrying about one of those six factors at a time, and ignoring the others. I have no idea how useful it is at making me a better writer, but it's an interesting way to not write my yuletide, anyway.

So here is POV character of Story #2, describing Main Character's outfit on their first meeting, with six different balances.

What the POV character knows about clothing: POV character actually knows a fair amount about fashion in their homeland, but is not in their homeland, and hasn't bothered to learn more than the basics for where they currently are; they rely on their partner if they need to know subtle stuff.

She was wearing a stiff tunic in what looked like fine carpet-woven wool from one of the nomadic groups that wandered in and out of the Cities, a hair ornament in wire of some white alloy, which I thought I should probably know the meaning of but didn't, and the loose, three-quarter-length undyed calfskin trousers and lace-up sandals that were common among City craftswomen. Some kind of loosely netted undertunic showed at the shoulders and neck. She wore a weapons belt that was engraved with an unfamiliar pattern, with a sheathed long dagger rigged in a basic style for a draw with the left hand, and a black cylinder seal tied on a long leather thong to a small carrying bag.

What the POV character notices about clothing: POV character doesn't care about fashion, but has spent a long time working as a fighter-for-hire in really insecure situations. Also is seriously nearsighted, so there's that too.

She was wearing heavy, dark clothes that would've let her fade into the background if not for the way she held herself, and would offer a fair amount of protection and maneuverability if it came to hand-to-hand combat. The only weapon showing was a long dagger, worn like somebody who knew how to use it but didn't very often, but from the tense way she stood I suspect there were others. She was in a mix of local women's clothing styles, which made it hard to judge, but it was all in good repair and durable high quality, and it was obvious she'd never been farther north than the hill country, or she'd've frozen off some toes. The trousers were a working woman's cut for comfort, durability and versatility, not for fighting: I could never wear that style.

What the reader knows about clothing: So setting-wise I'm aiming here for sort of a mix of old-fashioned sword and sorcery with actual historical bronze age Mesopotamia/Anatolia, except different. So like, 1/3 Unknown Kadath, 1/3 Akkadia, and 1/3 Making Stuff Up. I expect the audience of this story to be at least vaguely familiar with sword&sorcery milieu, I guess? And maybe have a tiny bit of relevant cultural/historical knowledge but not counting on a lot (not that I'm an expert, which is why we're going with 1/3 make stuff up). And of course they'll know zilch about my worldbuilding since this is the first thing in this setting I've actually finished. So here's what they might get if they were just looking at the art.

She was wearing a stiff, sleeveless, square-cut poncho-y tunic-y top with a coarse pattern of jagged stripes in shades of indigos and blacks, and some kind of undershirt with short sleeves of corded fringe in undyed hemp and a collar of some kind of patterned mesh tied from the same cord. She wore wide-legged skorts in soft brown leather and plain lace-up sandals in a slightly lighter shade. She wore a thick leather belt over the tunic, with dark interlaced plantlike engravings along it, and a matching scabbard for a narrow blade about a foot long, with a dark hilt just showing. Also hung on the belt was an unadorned square leather pouch and a cylinder of carved obsidian hung on a leather cord. She wore a narrow circlet of twisted electrum wire, simple in pattern and half-hidden by her hair.

What the reader needs to know about clothing So the super-tricky thing is that this story is a lot about cultural perceptions of gender? So of course I set it in a secondary world where the reader won't get the gender cues, with a narrator who is bad at noticing them. Bluh. But ok:

She's female, and dresses to make it very clear that she's female. She has some kind of connection with the Temple hierarchy, but not in a standard way. She dresses dark and compact and practical and gives the impression of someone who is in the process of actively defining and declaring her own identity, weaving in bits and pieces from various places and not anything finished. She is a City person and shows it in ways she probably doesn't even realize, even though she clearly has loyalties outside the Cities. She knows how to use weapons but isn't primarily a fighter. What she is beyond that is not obvious to a casual viewer.

What the author knows about clothing Too much. And too much of it is credited to thirteen-year-old me doing pixel art in typing class, and I don't care.

She wears the undershirt and headband of a novice in the priestesshood of the Moon Temples, like you might see around the Temple district in any of a hundred cities, but she's a bit old to still be a novice. Over that she wears a girl's tunic in the clan pattern of Evening Storm clan of the Wanderers, who are the local semi-pariah nomads, but without the trim that would mark someone who had passed their adulthood initiation. She's a lot too old for that, although a lot of the Wanderers who have settled in the cities put off their initiation for a long time. Very few of them are also Temple novices, though. She wears a distinctive, sinister-looking long dagger and knifebelt from the Eastern Hill Country, in the style of a hundred years ago, and a Black Temple seal that gives her an essentially unlimited line of credit anywhere in the Cities - not something a novice would usually have. Beyond that, she's dressed in the unremarkable, hardwearing clothes of a prosperous but not wealthy woman of the Cities, the style a lot of the more assimilated Wanderers are also picking up (but not Temple novices.)

What the author wants to tell about clothing Everything! Look at my OC, she's so cool! Also: nothing, omg descriptive passages are so boring and I am letting my inner thirteen-year-old have waaaay too much leeway here and nobody cares and my natural descriptive style is 'gray void with occasional teacup'. So basically.

I want to give the impression of darkness and rich heavy textures and a lot of history and cultural depth, and keep a general descriptive mood of sensory richness, lots of art and pattern and craft everywhere, even though my POV character is a nearsighted barbarian and doesn't appreciate it. Also I want to make it clear that this character is really special and has a lot going on, well beyond the text of this one story, because she is my character and everybody should adore her.

And here is the current version of that description, from my oh-humanity-it-needs-so-much-revision draft (I did not look back at this before doing the exercise): "[She was] wearing the patterned, stiff wool poncho of one of the Wanderer clans over brown leather trews and the fringes of a Temple novice." And then recounting that impression to a companion, as part of trying to figure her out: "And she was wearing a strange mix of Wanderer and Temple clothes, but all things that women and female priestesses wear, as far as I've seen."

...Anybody else wanna try that?

Comments

[recessional]

Usually my consideration is one that sort of skims over all of those while being slightly different: what does the author want to tell the reader via the description of the clothing?

That then becomes subject to all the limitations of the stuff you identify, but to me sort of stands behind it: what is it I am trying to DO with these descriptions of clothing? Am I trying to say something about the person wearing the clothing? The person looking at the clothing? The setting? Some combination of the above? Am I just revelling in my own descriptive writing and assuming that my reader will to? Am I trying to set a specific image in my reader's minds because in order for something to work in the narrative later they need to have a clear visual picture of this moment?

After I figure that out, then your list of Whats I think is really good. But first I have to know what outcome I want.

I have a paragraph from a fic:

Granted, that was "finest" as defined by the income of an entry-level Records clerk whose beau happened to be a journeyman fine-weaver and could get her scraps and discount cloths, but Nadia had her own flare. Today she had on a dark red split top-skirt, stiff around the hem and split-borders with blue-and-white birds picked out in embroidery, over a soft-skirt in a warm cream that brought out the warmth in her skin, with sandals over bare feet underneath. Her shirt was the same colour as her soft-skirt, and cut to leave the top of her shoulders bare, while her densely-embroidered, dark-blue vest made a nice line from just below her hips to the high collar. Her hair was caught up in a fashionable braid with ever-so-many decorative loops, and white and dark-blue ribbons wove in and around the braids, along with her treasured sea-shell hair-clasp at the back.

She was nearly an engraving: a young city-woman on Longest Day's Night.

Which is from a while ago so it's a bit clunkier than I like but still works for the point, because some of the reason it's clunky is I'm trying to do a whole bunch with it - most of it about setting, because this is a secondary world, and moreover a secondary world that superficially resembles our own only to have some very big differences. So I'm using Nadia to establish a whole bunch of assumptions about female appearance, age appearances, income appearances, skin-tone assumptions, and even location/trade-based assumptions, given the sea-shell is "treasured".

So yeah.

/pointless babble

[melannen]

For the way I work, it's a lot more helpful to figure out my constraints, and then figure out where I can go within them, I think? So if I start with "what do I want to say" I get lost in a sea of possibilities (because honestly the possibilities are endless, and I want to say all the things) and either get blocked or end up with huge clunky OOC paragraphs, but if I start with "What is it possible for me to say without going IC or losing the reader?" and "What do I absolutely have to say for the story to work?", I can work in what I want to say around that. (That really applies to all my writing, at all scales, really.)

But everybody has a different workflow that works for them.

(Not that I'm anything like that systematic when in comes to doing this in RL, but it's neat to try to break down the stuff I keep track of.)

[recessional]

Oh god no, to the systematic: me neither. Mostly I just point my brain at the passage and let it run, but yeah.

And that makes sense.

[alexseanchai]

...fascinating and informative!

[melannen]

Yay!

[alexseanchai]

It also makes me want to write a created world fantasy just so I can play with that without getting into real-world fashion about which I know nil. :)

[melannen]

I spent a long time writing almost entirely created world fantasy on the basis it meant I didn't have to know real world stuff. And then I, um, realized that was even harder, because to build it from the ground up I want to know everything that could possibly be related.

But I do love playing with non-real-world fashion!

[alexseanchai]

Ha yes valid point!

I can tell. :)

[skygiants]

This is a really cool exercise! I'm leaving a comment as a mental note to myself to come back and try when I have more brain.

[melannen]

Yay for having brain (sometime)!

[ratcreature]

This is really interesting.

I kind of loathe clothing. In RL I don't care much beyond comfort and function but it is an annoying hassle to buy, and in fiction I normally don't care about imagining its detail, except when I want to draw a character in fanart, so at that point I then hate if the author didn't include super detailed descriptions.

And drawing clothing is awful, because it is complicated and if you don't understand how the mechanics work you end up with ridiculous stuff like superhero boob socks that could only work when drawn, never in RL.

It is no coincidence that my icon avatar is a cartoon who only wears clothing as character props, but not any when it is just me.

So I'm kind of jealous that writers can skip over clothing or vary their focus like in your examples but you have to deal with it in art.

[melannen]

Ah, yeah, you can get away with so much less in art.

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Ah, yeah, you can get away with so much less in art. <_< (On the other hand, art does make it a lot easier to get the idea of a visual across, once you know what you're actually doing - I'm never sure if someone drawing off my descriptions would end up with anything like what I'm imagining.)

(but still, hard and awful.)

(a lot of the more idiosyncratic parts of my wardrobe are based on me as a teenager going "well, if I want to be able to <i>draw</i> fantasy outfits, I have to know how the clothes actually <i>wear</i>... and then deciding it was easier to just keep wearing them than @$%$# draw them.)

[ratcreature]

I find it surprisingly hard to find good references for stuff like period clothing and detail that actually show how something work so you can extrapolate. Like pictures about fashion are more about the idea of a style, and often are not really hi-res, especially online, and resources for people who are into making (pseudo-)historical costumes tend to assume you are a person who knows how to sew or wants to make a costume and has knowledge about clothing rather than someone who just find out how some fastening would look from the side when all you have is a fashion picture showing it from the front or whatever.

[justice_turtle]

Duuuuuuuude, this is fascinating and I gotta try it when I'm not on the road. :D

[melannen]

I thought through most of the samples while I was driving! It's fun.

[shipwreck_light]

Oh! I know a trick to describing guns if anyone needs it.

-Give the company name and the caliber. Stop.
-If in a non IRL setting, give the name and the caliber. Since you're making these up, the company name should be evocative. A reader will fill a White & Company in differently than a Walpurgisnacht. (Demo: which one of the company names I gave is a "hitman's gun"? See, you already know and I didn't bother with the caliber.) Stop.
-If the POV character doesn't know the name and caliber, describe how close and how big it is. Stop.
-If you absolutely have to add any more info, have someone yell it. "Damnit, are those hollowpoints? You /ass/! This is a duck hunt!"
-Other'n that, content yourself with the mess it makes.

I love these posts. They are educational and warm my heart. Thank you for making them! And for all of your tag wrangling.

[ellen_fremedon]

Another trick I've heard is to give the name, caliber, and the word "modified." So that when you make the inevitable error in talking about what it can do, the gun enthusiasts will say "Aha! There's the modification."

[shipwreck_light]

Oh! That's cool :D. It also implies that the character is a bit of a maverick, possibly picky.

I actually have a character I can try this with. Would you mind?

[ellen_fremedon]

It's not my trick-- I learned it at a workshop. Go right ahead!

[shipwreck_light]

Aha! Still- thank you. I really like this idea :D.

[melannen]

I will keep that in mind if I ever have to write something with guns for an audience of gun people!

Unfortunately it would not work on me because I can't actually tell you which of those is a hitman's gun. But then adding the caliber wouldn't help me figure that out either. (If you give me the general type of gun - rifle/pistol/revolver/rocket launcher/carronade/nacelle-mounted ballistic railgun/whatever - and the caliber, I can generally give you a vague idea of what it's good for and why the person probably has it, but ask me about manufacturers and I'm lost.)

[shipwreck_light]

So, type is more useful to you? That is good to know! *notesnotes*

(Possibly, I am picky about calibers because I can only handle semiautos within a certain range.)

The White & Company .22s are the guns I've spun as hitmen's guns in-universe. The other company's the one I reference for more fanciful situations and characters.

...actually, you've given me a thought. I'm going to ask the person I'm revising with to make a reference to .22s being preferred for hits. Just 'cause I gave the assassin with the most jobs under his belt one doesn't mean the dots got connected. Thank you!

[melannen]

Ah, see, if you'd made me guess I would've got that completely backward! I was thinking "well, Walpurgisnacht sounds vaguely German/Eastern European, and there's a stereotype that criminals and militias use former-Soviet-bloc guns, so maybe that one?"

If you give me general type in plain English and something about size or caliber, I will at least have a vague idea what's up. If you give me manufacturers and jargon I will shrug and start skimming until I get to a bit that starts making sense again. I'm sure other people do the same thing with clothing. ^_^

At least 90% of my RL gun experience involves vintage Daisy air rifles. I know that most people can only easily handle up to a certain caliber, and it varies by person, because I read Eroica fanfic in which that is an occasional plot point! But I have no visceral knowledge of it.

[genarti]

Yeah, same -- I'm not enough of a gun person for manufacturer to tell me much, and caliber is only of limited use, but general type I know.

That said, it's often an important characterization point whether the character looks at something and sees Manufacturer Model Caliber (modification), or if they see "semiautomatic pistol," or if they see "...handgun???" But if I were writing a character of the former sort, I'd have to either do research or throw myself at the mercy of a gun-knowing friend.