The 12 Days of Liz: Day Ten: What Are You Wearing?

When I originally wrote the scenes at the wedding and in the hours after, Liz was wearing a purple bridesmaid’s dress. She didn’t like it, but she put it on and forgot about it, and I wrote the scenes with only a few references to what she was wearing, mostly comments from other people.

But then as I rewrote and focused, the story changed, and after the wedding, Lavender made Liz switch dresses with her (she had a good reason, I swear), so Liz is wearing a white silk wedding dress that’s a little too tight for her in the next four scenes. As I rewrote those scenes, I realized what a huge impact clothes can have on a character in specific and a story in general.

I’ve never been a fan of designer fiction, the kind of story where the heroine wears Manolos and Armani and carries a Birkin. I don’t think–not sure, there’s twenty books in my backlist and I haven’t read some of them in years–that I’ve ever done that, definitely not to a heroine. But there have been articles of clothing that were important–the Incredibra in Anyone But You springs to mind–that were about character and changed the plot, and Lavender’s wedding dress is that kind of clothing, so it changed everything.

First the dress changed, because it had to be something that Liz could actually get into, and she’s heavier than Lavender. Not by a lot, but she’s not gym-toned the way Lavender is. So the slender silk tank dress had to be a lot more flared, and I gave it a lace-up back just to be sure Liz could get into it

Then it had to be clearly a wedding dress, not just a long white dress, because people make comments about it all night, and I like that because it tells you a lot about the people making the comments, so I gave it a train, a fairly long one.

That was good in other ways: Liz isn’t that graceful in jeans and a T-shirt, so the dress physcially hampers her, which is a nice call-back to the way she feels about getting married.

And finally, there are Liz’s reactions to wearing the dress. After all, it’s the dress Lavender was wearing when she married Liz’s old love. And it’s a wedding dress, and Liz is commitment phobic in the extreme. And it’s Lavender’s dress which is going to make wearing it in the hours after Lavender dies really uncomfortable.

I’m still working through all of this, but I don’t think I’ve ever written anything where the clothing the heroine was wearing had so much impact, both on the plot, on the other characters, and especially on the character wearing it. It’s turning out to be extremely useful, so I’m glad the plot shifted and Lavender and Liz had to change clothes. Turns out changing clothes changes everything else, too.