Writing 101: Storytelling

I blog a great deal about punctuation, proper grammar, the importance of staying organized and all the work self-published authors have to do in order to get reviews. But at the end of the day, after you're done promoting on Twitter and editing pages and thinking up new ideas, you've got respect the fundamentals of writing. Don't ever forget the most important element of any good fiction book: storytelling.

The Elements of a Story

The art of telling a great story is very complex, at least until you break it down into its most basic parts. You should always try to write realistic dialogue and avoid over-writing throughout. You've got to think about capitalization and comma placement and all of those little details. But before you do any of that, you have to know what story you're going to tell...and you're going to have to make sure it's a complete story. 

It's simple -- deceptively so. Many authors seem to forget the most basic element of writing fiction. It's all about storytelling, and when you get right down to basics there are only three parts to any story: a beginning, a middle and an end. Does your book have those three elements? Any short story, any poem, any song, and piece of writing must have these elements. If they don't, the writing is going to feel unfinished and it's sure to feel unsatisfying.

• The Beginning

Your book may have a Page 1, but that doesn't mean it's got a beginning. The beginning of any story should introduce the primary protagonist (the hero or heroine of the story) and ideally, the primary antagonist (the villain, or bad guy). It should also set up all the action that's going to follow. Make sure the reader understands the setting of the story in the beginning, and give the reader just enough background to form a basic understanding of who the characters are.

Lots of authors fail to write a proper beginning because they rush straight to the action that takes place in the middle of the story. This makes the story feel rushed. Instead of allowing things to unfold naturally, the reader is hit in the face with plot right away. Nothing major should develop until the reader has some working knowledge of the main character; how else can the reader accurately judge and process everything that's about to happen?

• The Middle

All the action of the story, the real meat, is in the middle. Many writers excel at writing the middle portion of the story, when it's all love scenes and action scenes and important plot points. Creating a strong middle doesn't mean you've created a strong story, however. If you skimp on the beginning, I don't have the right context for all the stuff that's happening here. And if you skimp on the ending, then you just cheated me and wasted all my time with your half-told story.

• The Ending

The end of the story is where the reader's work all pays off, and it's the trickiest part of any story to write. You don't want to the reader to feel cheated, but you may not be the type to offer a completely satisfying happy ending, either. There are really only two ways to end a story: neat, and cliffhanger. In a neat ending, all the loose ends are tied up. All the questions are answered, the mysteries are resolved and the reader has some idea of where all the important characters have ended up or will end up in their lives. When the Harry Potter series finally came to an end, for example, the reader got to see all the main characters in the future and had a good idea of how their lives ultimately turned out.

It was all nice and neat, with the villain dead and all that. But on the flip side of the ending coin, you've got the cliffhanger ending -- also known as a messy ending. This time, the reader still does have questions. Few things, if anything, have been resolved. The villain is still out there, somewhere, and someday this story is going to continue. It's tricky to write cliffhanger endings, because you have to do it in a way that doesn't discourage the reader. Give them a reason to stick with your book series without insulting them too badly at the end of the book. Some resolution should be provided; some progress must be made within the pages of the story itself. Make it clear that this chapter of the story, at least, has come or is coming to its end.

The ending completes any story, or continues it to its next phase. Do it badly, and the reader will have a lasting negative impression of your work. Do it well, and they'll keep coming back for more stories. The ending will make or break your book, but you've got to put just as much effort into the beginning and middle, too. Remember the fundamentals of writing, and your writing will be a lot better. 

Fiction Fashion Icon: Anne

Anne Shirley was bookish, talkative, orphaned, accident-prone...and my hero. I loved her story when I was younger, and the one thing I always associated with Anne was her red hair. Fashion is total -- it's not just about the clothes. But Anne had some very specific ideas about that, too, and that meant that I had to as well. 

Pigtails and Puffed Sleeves

Anne Shirley was first introduced in 1908 by Lucy Maud Montgomery in Anne of Green Gables, the beginning of what would become an extraordinarily successful YA series. She hated her red hair, and I've always wanted it badly (I'm blonde instead, and even that's debatable). So much so, in fact, that I dyed mine red for half of high school. Well, I tried. Turns out, blonde doesn't hold red dye all that well. The point is, Anne's been a personal style icon of mine for a long time. She didn't think her red hair was very fashionable, but she was certain about one must-have detail: puffed sleeves.

The dress scene in the film version of Green Gables is a big deal, and that's because in the book the scene is so very special. Matthew gets to thinking about Anne's clothing and in particular her sleeves, after she makes a big deal about wishing to have a dress with puffed sleeves. So Matthew boldly goes to visit nosy Mrs. Lynde for help, and soon enough Anne has a dress with the puffiest sleeves in all the world. On film it's blue and fantastic, and Anne wears a blue bow to match.

Anne's style is pretty simple, with a few embellishments. Later in life, she wears a pearl engagement ring because she's never cared for diamonds, and an imitation pearl necklace that one of her sons thought was the real thing when he bought it for her. She grows accustomed to her red hair, avoids pinks and yellows at all costs, and adds a statement piece to her outfit every now and then. Anne might add flowers to her hat or put a stunning necklace on display, but the most important thing about her style is its versatility. She may start the day at a school picnic and end it in the dark, dreary woods -- so footwear choices are especially important. Anne's not above trying to improve upon her lot in life. She even dyes her hair in one very memorable scene in the book, only the color doesn't turn out quite as planned (we've all been there).

What would Anne wear if she were a modern girl in today's world? Check out this post from The Gloss to see an Anne-inspired high fashion look.

Writing 101: Falling Out of Love with Writing

Before you self-publish, writing is a passion and a burning desire. Once you start self-publishing, it can start to become a chore. Falling out of love with writing is common to all authors, and it happens to everyone from time to time. There is definitely such a thing as getting too much of a good thing. 

Breakin' Up is Hard to Do 

Remember when writing was a hobby? Once you start self-publishing, it becomes part of your to-do list. Now, you've got books to promote. You've got links to Tweet. You've got sales figures to check and pages to edit and networking to do and forums to check...and oh yeah, you need to get some writing done in the middle of all of that. 

Self-published authors have a lot on their plate, and that makes it easy to fall out of love with writing. Many indie writers spend the least amount of time on the actual writing part. The research, the editing, the promotion -- this all takes up a huge amount of time. Creating book covers and trailers is also time-consuming. It's enough to drive anyone to the verge of a breakup. 

Think back to the first question again. You've got to remember when writing was your passion and your hobby, and come to terms with the fact that your role as a writer has now expanded. All the extra stuff is going to improve your skills and expose you to more readers. While you're doing all this remembering, don't forget about the time when no one read your work at all. You gain exposure as a self-published author, and that means you've got to put time in on a bunch of other tasks. 

Whenever you need to, schedule a little time to romance your writing again. Take time out from Tweeting or blogging or thinking about plots or whatever you're doing, and take a reading break. Go back to a book or short story you wrote a long time ago, something you haven't looked at it a while, and start reading. You'll see how you've improved since then, and you'll remember all those old feelings. Read long enough, and you may fall back in love with your first love (writing) all over again. If even that doesn't shake you out of your funk, give yourself a day off. Ignore social media, ignore the to-do list, ignore your email if you dare, and just take a break. Go do something else, get refreshed, and return to the page feeling a lot more loose and relaxed. You and your love of writing are bound to hit the occasional rough patch, but the two of you can always work it out.

Judgment: Sneak Peek

Happy Halloween! It's a day for scares, and that means it's perfect for unveiling my newest excerpt from Judgment (Deck of Lies, #4). The fourth and final installment in the Deck of Lies comes out next month. If you buy Death (Deck of Lies, #3) from Amazon, Smashwords or B&N, you'll get an excerpt from the first chapter. If you haven't already read the first three books in the Deck of Lies, you probably shouldn't read this sneak peek!

Chapter 4

The day’s mail arrived about forty minutes after my tutoring session ended. It was 3 PM, so it was Morales who came to the cell with a stack of envelopes and magazines in his hands. “Mail call,” he announced. “Please stand back from the bars in the center of your cell.”

I knew this, of course, and I rolled my eyes as he made the requisite announcement. Minutes ticked by in silence as he sorted through the pile. The magazines he shoved between the bars, where they landed on the concrete floor with lazy slapping sounds. The envelopes he saved until last, looking into each one before he either dropped it into the mailbag on his shoulder or slid it between the bars into my cell. They were all slit open, and earlier in the day someone had already looked at every single piece of mail sent my way. Everything I sent out was examined, too.

The guards used to give me every single piece of mail, even the ugliest stuff. My upcoming trial, and Laurel’s murder, had been national news for weeks. The story wasn’t being covered as vigorously as it had been in the very beginning, but I was still getting plenty of what the guards used to mockingly call “fan mail.”

It started arriving for me two days after I was locked in jail in July. The first “fan mail” was written in bold red marker on a crisp white page. It simply said “you will burn in hell.” Other letters were more intricate, and more threatening. I’d even received artwork, graphic caricatures of myself sitting in an electric chair or hanging from a rope around my neck.

They terrified me and haunted me, those pictures, until I finally broke down and told River about it. He assured me it couldn’t possibly happen. “They do lethal injection in California,” he’d said.

So the picture of me in the chair, with my hair sticking up all over my head and my eyes bulging out of my skull, shouldn’t frighten me at all.

Morales was the first guard to start sorting the mail for me, throwing away the hate letters and horrible drawings and leaving only the stuff I might want to see. By the time August was coming to its end, none of the guards still subjected me to the horrors the came to me in the mail each and every day.

The world hated me…because it loved Laurel.

I’d read all the articles that I could get my hands on, and managed to pull some information out of River and Asher. The press were treating Laurel like she was some sort of angel, and I was this totally messed up girl with a messed up past. Laurel was the queen of the Debate Team, she was on the volleyball team, she ran marathons for charity, she was active in teen activities at one of the big LA churches. She was beautiful, and she was tall, and she was apparently incapable of taking a bad picture at any point in her brief life. The media had printed the entire Riordan family album in the last few weeks. Pictures of baby Laurel, toddler Laurel and school girl Laurel were splashed on the front pages of People and the like. Teary quotes from volunteer organizers and teachers were printed and re-printed.

Every picture they’d ever printed of me showed wild hair, reddish eyes and a twisted facial expression that made me look like Satan’s daughter. The worst one of them all was one of the pictures taken at my hearing – I was wearing county jail orange and staring into the crowd with an angry, intense look on my face.

“Just one letter today,” Morales chirped. He’d thrown most of my stack back into the mailbag. “Anything outgoing?”

“Not today.”

“Be back to check on you later.”

I nodded, and waited for him to get to the end of the hall before I rushed forward to gather up my remaining mail. The one letter I still had was from River, and as usual it contained very few words. It was another pencil sketch, this one an elaborate design of curving lines that reminded me of flowers, with a short note on the back: see you soon.

Writing 101: Keeping Up the Energy

I am literally exhausted every day by 1 pm. This is because I spend my mornings cleaning and working out, and it's a pretty intense routine. When the afternoon rolls around, I finally sit down to work...and I stay right where I fall. I don't stop working until 9 or 10 pm at night. The life of an indie author can be packed pretty full of stuff to do, and that's why keeping up the energy is so very important. 

The American Obsession

Energy has become a commodity in the United States. Watch television Stateside for an hour, and you'll see that it's true. Shows are packed with ads for energy drinks, of all things, and they've become so prolific you can even get them in a diet version. Indie authors, who often maintain full-time jobs while doing all of the marketing, research, writing and editing for their books on their own, are probably the prime target for these ads. If self-published authors aren't tired and overworked, then no one is. 

But keeping up your energy level by pumping yourself full of sugar and caffeine, the main ingredients in energy drinks, is no way to write. Unnatural energy and heavily caffeinated drinks that make you wired are also going to totally wreck your focus, make you forgetful and may manifest itself as frantic, unorganized writing. By the same token, being overly tired can make you lazy when you're writing. You might skip over the details and rush too quickly toward plot points, creating text that feels harried and stilted. 

It's not natural to move between highs and lows all day long, and there are much better ways of keeping up the energy so you can stay focused, write well and still take care of all those other things on your to-do list. 

Healthy Energy

Trying to be creative after working all day, dealing with the family, maybe tending to chores and engaging in exercise is really a form of self-torture that many indie authors happily embrace. But this lifestyle will start to feel unsustainable pretty darn quickly. Everyone needs down time, rest time, time off and time to sit and stare at the wall if that's really what they want. Scheduling every available minute is wearing on the body and on the mind. Self-published authors have got to make room for themselves. Make sure you've got some free time and some "you" time. Take the time for that manicure. Take the time to go shopping for that new pair of boots. Take the time to wander around the bookstore (if there's still one open in your town). 

And in-between all of that time-taking, you're going to have to make time for everything else. Do it in a healthy way by learning how to keep up your energy in a positive way.

• Showering. That's right, nothing's off-limits at this blog. I'm even going to give you shower tips. Instead of waking yourself up in the morning with coffee, change your showering habits. After you're all finished and nice and relaxed under that hot water, turn on the cold. Give yourself an icy blast to wake up and face the day with much wider eyes.
• Coffee-drinking. Speaking of coffee, if you're going to drink it try to wait. I don't drink one of my iced coffee drinks until the early afternoon. When you wake up in the morning, you should already have some good energy going because you just stopped sleeping. If you pick yourself up with the caffeine early, you're going to feel totally used up by the three o'clock. 
• Eating habits. You want to know why you're tired? Because you aren't eating enough carbs. It became the fashion to eschew carbohydrates in favor of losing weight, and suddenly the energy drink industry boomed. These two things are not unrelated. Carbohydrates are essential to providing the body with energy, and most people need to eat a diet that's 50 percent carbs every day. If you want to do it in a weight-aware fashion, eat wheat breads and low-cal crackers, thin bagels and potatoes that have been grilled or baked instead of fried. I eat a carb-rich lunch every day right around 1 pm to give myself a boost of natural energy and perk myself up after my grueling morning routine. When do you start to feel tired and unfocused? Go eat a slice of wheat toast with sugar-free jelly and see how that suits you instead of reaching for an energy drink. 
• Sleeping. This is often where I fail, but never underestimate the importance of sleep. The human body needs to sleep daily in order to regenerate and recharge, and if you don't get at least three uninterrupted hours you may as well never get in bed at all. I try to give myself 6 hours of sleep and even that doesn't feel like enough. Don't work so much that you aren't sleeping enough. I started waking myself up an hour later in the mornings, because I found that I was so tired when I woke up earlier it took me an hour longer just to really get going anyway. Are you wasting time in the mornings because you're just too exhausted? Pay attention to how long it takes you to complete your morning routine. Sleep in the next day, clock yourself again, and see how sleep makes a difference. 

Keeping up the energy is important if you want to keep yourself sane while you work at being a self-published author. You shouldn't drag around all day feeling tired. When writing begins to become a chore, you might need to think about changing some habits and shifting your schedule if at all possible. If you can't function without using caffeine and other weird tricks to keep yourself energized, you're doing way too much. It's always okay to slow down a little, relax a little more and work a little less. Your writing will be better because of it.

Writing 101: Committing Murder

At some point, every author has to face the possibility of committing murder by killing off one of their characters. When it's done well, you can bring an audience to tears. When it's handled incorrectly, you can receive death threats on Twitter. Committing murder is serious business, even if you're only doing it on the page.

Death by Fiction

You don't have to write mysteries to contemplate murder when you're writing a book. Ask J. K. Rowling. She writes fantastical children's books, but she's definitely guilty of fictioncide. Where there is life, there is also death. Instead of ignoring this universal truth, some authors embrace it and use it as a plot device. In some stories, death has to happen to get a certain point across or make something important happen. 

But it's not something you can introduce without advance preparation, and even then you have to walk a pretty careful line. Death is very emotional, even when it's the death of a fictional character.

1,000 Ways to Kill

Before you kill, think. There are lots of different considerations you're going to have to make before you delete someone from the pages of your book for ever.

• Do I know this character? Don't kill for killing's sake. Kill a character that's already been introduced in the book or else it's just empty. If the character doesn't matter, fine, but in most cases you're going to want to create an emotional reaction. You can't do that unless I already know this character, and have preexisting feelings for them. 
• How did they die? The death scene is often pivotal in any book. Make sure you do it justice. If the reader is going to witness the death through the eyes of one or more characters, don't make it too gruesome. It's okay for parts of a book to be difficult to read because of heightened emotions, but don't make it impossible to read. You don't want readers closing your book and never picking it up again because the death scene is too brutal. If the characters are experiencing the death second-hand, because they're learning about it from another source, you may have to work harder to establish the emotion of the scene. Here's something to remember: if you don't cry when you're writing it, I'm not likely to cry when I'm reading it.
• Why does it matter? There should be some consequences from the death. If a character dies, every other character can't carry on with business as usual like it doesn't matter. There has to be some ripple effect, something has to happen as a result, or else the death really has no place being in the book. 

It's never an easy decision to kill a character, but sometimes it is necessary for the story. Make sure you do it right. If it's too traumatic to readers, they may hate you and your book. Soften the effects of the death, and make it clear that something good has come out of this death, in order to balance out the trauma of the event. If the character being killed is an evil and hated one, try to introduce some humanity and sadness into the death. You don't want readers celebrating death in a bloodthirsty fashion. Even when villains die, it should feel a little bit sad.

Books on Film: Psycho

Halloween is almost here...but not yet. There's still time for one more horror-themed book on film, and for the last novel in the series I've picked the best of the best: Psycho. As far as villains go, the one in this story is the one I've always found to be the most terrifying.

The Book

That's right: Psycho was actually a book before it became possibly the most well-known slasher film of all time. It was written in 1959 by Robert Bloch, and it revolves around a man named Norman Bates. 

He runs a small motel just outside of Fairvale, and lives with his dominating mother. The state, unnamed, has moved the highway and the motel has been struggling ever since. They are arguing angrily about the general state of things when the young, lovely Mary Crane arrives at the motel to rent a room. 

She should've stuck to the highway. She's avoiding it because she's a fugitive. After deciding on a whim to take $40,000 from the real estate company where she works, Mary had to make a run for it. The money is for her boyfriend, who has a ton of debt, and it's going to help them get married. But the plan is looking less and less practical by the time she arrives, tired and hungry, at the motel. When Norman invites her to dinner, she accepts. 

This enrages Mrs. Bates, who seems to hate everyone, and Mary overhears the old woman screaming "I'll kill the bitch!" Still, Mary doesn't back down from her dinner date and she gently tries to draw Norman Bates out over the meal. She asks him about himself, and suggests that he might be happier if his mother was off somewhere receiving the proper kind of care she so clearly needs. Norman insists there's nothing really wrong with his mother, and observes that "we all go a little crazy sometimes."

By the time she goes to her room for the night, Mary has decided to return the money because she fears she may end up just like Norman. She steps into the shower to clean up before bed. It's the last thing she ever does. Minutes later, a figure that looks like an old woman savagely attacks her with a butcher knife. Mary winds up beheaded on the floor of the shower.

It's Norman's fate to discover her there. He toys with the idea of turning his mother in, or otherwise letting her pay for her crime, but ultimately finds he can't do it. He gets rid of the body, and everything at the motel goes back to business as usual.

But pretty young women and $40,000 don't disappear without somebody noticing. Mary has a sister named Lila, and she's not about to give her up so easily. She meets up with Mary's boyfriend Sam to track her down. A private detective named Arbogast, hired to trace the missing money, joins them because there's always power in numbers. Arbogast becomes suspicious when he questions Norman Bates, who says that Mary stayed the night at the motel and left, when Norman won't allow his mother to be questioned. 

Arbogast goes to the house, next to the motel, to question the old woman himself. The old woman ends up killing him, too, this time with a razor.

It's at this point that the twist ending is slowly, painstakingly revealed to end with a chilling scene at the police station. If by some miracle you don't know the plot of the story, I'll not to completely ruin it for you.

Two sequels were written, but neither had a great deal of success. The book did gain some notoriety when Alfred Hitchcock adapted it in 1960, but this is one book that has been outshined by its film version. When you put an amazing horror story in the hands of the greatest horror director, this is to be expected.

Film

Hitchcock made a lot of strange decisions when he turned Psycho into a movie in 1960. He didn't allow advance screenings for critics, and decreed that no one would be admitted to theaters once the film began. He also decided to make it in black and white, though color was available and more popular at the time. 

It didn't matter. Psycho is still one of the best scary movies ever made, and if you haven't seen it then I implore you to do whatever you need to do to start watching it as soon as you're done with this post. Hitchcock's version has since been adapted and several sequels have followed, but the original is the best. How good is this movie? Janet Leigh, who was in the film for only the first forty minutes and appeared in a handful of scenes, won an Academy Award for her turn as Marion Crane (changed from Mary for the film). She became widely associated with the film and became one of the first "scream queens" on the big screen. She's also well-known for being Jamie Lee Curtis's mother.

Anthony Perkins chillingly plays Norman Bates, so well that he was typecast for the remainder of his career. The reviews were mixed, the box office numbers phenomenal. Psycho changed the face of horror movies, and the AFI lists it as number one for the best horror flick ever made.

They're probably right. The film is a very faithful adaptation of the book. It even lifts dialogue straight from the page to bring it to the screen. The shower scene where Janet Leigh dies is now the stuff of film legend. It spans more than 3 minutes and puts the viewer right in the killer's point of view, a technique Hitch was famous for using. The scene contains over 50 film cuts and maddening extreme close-ups that are designed to heighten the terror.

Hitch himself said that his film "came entirely" from the book. That's only mostly true. Read the book, watch the movie, and you will find some small differences.

What Got Adapted?

The book takes readers even deeper into the mind of Norman Bates, who doesn't look much at all like Anthony Perkins. On the page, he's a paunchy middle-aged man who wears glasses, a big difference from the slim, younger, passably attractive Perkins. It makes the character much scarier on film, I think, but it's much more clear in the novel that Norman is terrifyingly introverted and lonely. 

More of Mary Crane's thoughts are also revealed in the book, as are the secondary characters who enter the story a little later. Norman also drinks excessively in the book and maintains a collection of pornography, character traits that are erased on the big screen.

The murder scenes are actually more detailed in the film than the book, a surprising reversal. The author doesn't exactly skip over the murders, but he doesn't exactly depict them in clear, gory detail, either. There is more violence in the book. On film, Marion Crane's head is never severed. No way would the studio have let Hitch shoot a scene like that. So he cut the scene to pieces instead with quick edits, and rumor has it that he used chocolate sauce to create the blood. The sauce had the perfect consistency, and since the film was being shot in black and white anyway it didn't really matter if it was red or brown.

Fiction Fashion Icon: Scarlett

Gone With the Wind was published 70 years after the Civil War ended, and introduced countless new generations to this bloody conflict in the United states. It was written in 1936 and became the biggest film ever made just three short years later. And even though it was written about a woman who lived way, way back in the 1860s, it helped to shape 1940s fashion and created one of the most famous fiction style icons of all time: Scarlett O'Hara. 

Belle in a Bell Skirt

Long-time readers of the blog know that Gone With the Wind is my favorite book and my favorite film, and if you've read and seen it then you probably know why. Many, many people cite the novel and the film as their favorites, and many women admire the central heroine (or anti-heroine, depending on your view): Scarlett O'Hara. 

Fashion plays a big part in the book. It's about living through a war, which is no easy time. In the south during the 1860s, it was particularly rough. There are many passages describing Scarlett's attire. She goes from wearing sprigged muslin and gowns with carefully-sewn pearls adorning them to being without a proper bonnet or even a petticoat under her dress. She lives without stockings and hoops and all those many mysterious items that were so essential in those days when skirts had to be several feet wide and brush the floor or you just weren't decent. 

But the fashion of the book didn't come alive until it hit the silver screen in full, glorious Technicolor. Vivien Leigh, playing Scarlett, was bedecked with yards of fabric, acres of jewelry and a wire hoop cage that was (blessedly) much lighter than the real deal would have been back in the day. And though she was already an aged heroine by contemporary 1940s film-goers, Scarlett's fashion leapt from the screen and into the closets of women all over America. 

After it was brought to the big screen in 1939, Gone With the Wind immediately became the most popular film of the day and of all time. It is still the highest-grossing movie ever made, if you factor in ticket price differences between then and now. Clothiers of all types took notice. 

The most popular pattern of the early 1940s mirrored the green and white dress Scarlett wears to the barbeque at Twelve Oaks. Many women also flocked to the dress shop to get a pattern for a white, ruffled gown with the long skirt, an item that mirrored the red-belted dress Scarlett wears in the opening scene of the flick. And the slim, cut silk wedding gowns of the 30s quickly fell out of favor as brides rushed to wear dresses made with puffy sleeves and organza fabric, more like the gown Scarlett wore when she married Charles Hamilton. Organza is still a popular wedding fabric today, though puffy sleeves are a bit less common.

Hats were everywhere in the summer of 1940. Big-brimmed styles were all the rage because of Scarlett's big hats, and some designers even created bonnet-like headpieces resembling some of the more casual headwear shown in the film. Women also rushed out to buy themselves hair netting and fabric bags, and began fashioning their locks with snoods like those worn by Scarlett.

Scarlett's fashion helped inspire women everywhere, and her story continues to delight book readers and movie watchers to this day. Her strong, fearless character has drawn the admiration of many, and that's why so many have tried to copy her style. So the next time you feel like ripping down the curtains to make a new dress, go with it. That's what Scarlett would want.