Writing Clothes

This week I was recalling a conversation I had with Don when I first met him twenty years ago (yes, it has been that long). I was going to lots of writers’ workshops at the time and working on a novel, and I said “I’m only going to buy writer clothes, from now on.” I meant that I didn’t want to think of my day job as important enough to buy clothes for any longer. Don laughed and said, “Writers wear any old dirty tee-shirt and don’t worry about it!” He was thinking of the writers of screenplays that he knew.

In the intervening years, I did have other jobs I dressed up for. Working in architecture firms made me more sophisticated in many ways. But by the time I got to Marin County and worked for a wine brokerage, we were all wearing jeans to work anyway. It was partly because some of the brokers went out to the vineyards every day, but also that we were far from the city, from banks and schools and other places where people interact with others daily in formal situations.

These days many people work from home, at least part of the day. And many of us are writing, in one form or another. I suspect there are quite a few dirty tee-shirts and pajamas out there where everyone lives and writes. As the Peter Steiner New Yorker cartoon says, “On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog.” For me, daily life is an integral part of writing. Perhaps because I am writing narrative fiction, I want it to be full of the sensuality of smells and sights and sounds. If I go downstairs for one of the red-fleshed cara cara oranges we bought at the market yesterday, its sweetness and tang may get into what I am writing. If the air is wet with the possibility of showers, and I start to smell the rain on the concrete sidewalks, it might too.

It’s the same with clothes. Life and writing touch each other. In fact the point I am most interested in is that exact point where the physical and mental life of a person is enriched by the heart and is felt by him to be important, to be part of his flowering, to be worth the tale. The clothes you are wearing, the external aspect of how you feel about your haircut, may absolutely affect the story you are telling. “The body is the unconscious” may be the central understanding of my generation, leading to all the mind-body awareness which has followed in many areas of life. And so, having become a person whose major activity is writing, I would just like to say, I may be wearing a tee-shirt, but at least it is clean!