Writers have their little tricks. Nearly all of them use a thesaurus to avoid overusing their favourite words, for example. And some like to dip into a phone book (or its modern equivalent the internet) to generate names for characters.
I’ve been writing fiction on and off for nearly four decades (no jokes about my journalism career please!), ever since Heinemann published me alongside Salman Rushdie, Nadine Gordimer, William Trevor and others in their Best Short Stories of the Year anthology when I was still in short trousers, so to speak.
But one thing I’ve never managed to do successfully is dress characters.
Anthony Burgess was a famously terrible dresser, partly because he was colourblind. If you watch him on old chatshow clips, he’s wearing brown shirts with green ties and so on.
But he knew his characters deserved better, so he would get his glamorous Italian wife to tell him what each of his characters ought to be wearing.
That’s what I could definitely use – someone to dress my characters for me. (Not the glamorous Italian wife – I’d need to be on Anthony Burgess level royalties to afford one.)