How to Write a Novel – Day 10: Clothes Make the Man

Film and theatre productions have huge costume departments, teams of people whose job it is to ensure that the clothes that the actors wear help to express and consolidate their personalities. Clothes can have this same function in novels. In addition, clothes link to actions. Getting dressed in the morning, taking off a coat when you enter a building, lifting a hat to greet a lady, these are all ways in which clothes can become part of the action, and potentially the drama, of your novel.

An example of the dramatic potential of clothes can be seen in Chapter 5 of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. In this scene, Gatsby is conducting a tour of his home, and comes to his bedroom:

Recovering himself in a minute he opened for us two hulking patent cabinets which held his massed suits and dressing-gowns and ties, and his shirts, piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high.

“I’ve got a man in England who buys me clothes. He sends over a selection of things at the beginning of each season, spring and fall.”

He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher — shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, and monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.

“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such — such beautiful shirts before.”

Consider writing dressing scenes to precede key events in your novel. Think about the clothes (armour!) your character puts on in preparation for these events. Consider the memories, feelings and associations that the clothes, as well as the action of dressing, evoke. If you’re brave, you might even want to try an extravagant scene like Gatsby’s display above.

Happy writing!

Originally published at blog.thecover.co on November 10, 2014.