Having taken a few swipes towards the topic of clothing in autopresentation, I think it’s time to move on to something else. I am sure that this is to no one’s surprise (among the 0 people who follow what I have to say) that this too will touch on some personal grips I have with fiction.

So what am I harping on about this time? Voice. How a character speaks. And I don’t mean this in terms of their vocabulary. Instead, I mean the tone and how that potentially affects their perception among other people.

I think most of hoomanity has a culturally induced paraphilia for clothing. At least as far as dressing women go. You might note that male clothing is comparatively dull and plain, without much variation. And when you get down to, let’s say, the sexy stuff there’s just nothing there.

But like with many things, there are different approaches to clothing yourself, especially when you are a woman and have access to the much broader pool of items than a man does. Dressing your woman in fiction is part of her character since as far as hoomans go, clothing is part of something called autopresentation (also known as impression management) which impacts how others think about us.

Look, I’m going to be open here, narrative necessity is bullshit.

In case you’re not familiar with the term, it refers to a character taking action because it’s required for the story to progress in the way the author envisions it. This might at first sound very inconspicuous, because isn’t that what all writing is about? Well… yes, but also no. The issue with narrative necessity is that it’s forced. Generally, the flow of the plot comes from the characters doing things that make sense to them, or at least that’s how it should be. In this case, however, this action is forced and makes the character performing it look like a bloody dingdong.

Perception is a funny thing. We often take what we see, hear, feel and smell as being a kind of benchmark for what we’re interacting with. Rarely though do we really explore our own biasses in how we perceive.

Now, this might sound very cliche, but have you ever considered the colour red you see might be a different colour red than someone else sees? On the flip side to that… have you ever considered if the red you see is the same red you’ve seen previously, under different circumstances?