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So in high school sometimes we’d have author’s visit and we’d be allowed to skip classes to attend their workshops (which were high school student only versions of writing workshops for adults, so they were notably shorter than regular writing workshops). And it was usually a lot of fun to do this. I was already writing fanfic at the time and the two workshops I’d already attended were genuinely helping me improve my writing.
This isn’t a story about those two fun, useful, enlightening workshops, however.
So one day one of my BFFs and I drive over to the neighboring high school where the latest workshop will happen. We’re excited, show up at the school’s front office for directions to the library, and are just clutching our permission slips and writing notebooks because today’s workshop is supposed to be on character development. And in short order we were both extremely let down.
I... don’t understand how this author misunderstood what character development meant. She was a published author. Multiple books, at least some of which formed a series.
The entire workshop was not on character development. It was on deciding what the characters would wear. Because that was the only acceptable step one in ‘developing a character’ in her opinion. I was, quite likely, visibly disappointed that the information on the workshop had been basically false advertising because I could have been covertly writing fanfic instead of taking notes in my English Lit class instead. It would have been a better use of my time, to be honest.
Like... we were supposed to represent everything about our characters in the clothes. Without considering any other external factors. Except for the setting, but only in the vaguest terms. She was also easily irritated with us for not understanding her poorly conveyed instructions, so anything useful she could have taught through these exercises was pretty much completely lost. And, as I noted, I must have been visibly disappointed with her workshop because she seemed to take a particular dislike to me.
(I swear to god she was deliberately trying to make me cry and ignoring some of the students who actually wanted her attention by calling on me in order to insult everything I’d just written. What a petty bitch, we were high school students, lady. Did she conduct her workshops with adults this poorly?)
I do get that describing clothes can be useful when conveying character traits or other information. Take Cassandra from The Librarians - we knew she had to be queer before she ever was seen flirting with a woman because the way she dressed makes allo/cis/straight people annoyed. (Am I making fun of my parents a little here? Yes.) That is, admittedly, a tv show, but the point stands. Clothing can and does convey important information.
But as you develop a character, they’re often rewritten many times over until both the characters and the plot match the story you really need to tell. Which means their clothing choices can change radically from when you first sit down with vague ideas about the story to when you’re doing what is (hopefully) a final draft. (And, yes, this is just as applicable to fanfic as original fic.) I was already aware of this as teen me, so I was particularly annoyed with her insistence that a character’s clothing should be the first thing decided on because... it was entirely possible I’d throw away the character’s look halfway through outlining the actual plot (never mind actually writing the story) because what I needed from the character would end up changing. (She kept insisting that would never happen so I am, again, bewildered that this woman was a published author and had apparently never once re-written a character’s appearance as the plot evolved. I call bullshit.)
Sadly this was also the last writer’s workshop I got to attend in high school, which sucks. There was supposed to be another one, but the author had to cancel a week beforehand for reasons I don’t remember (and probably didn’t pay attention to at the time). So, unfortunately, this workshop has ended up being the one I remember most strongly, because she handled everything so poorly.
