Define “dowdy”

Look at these two photos. Is the woman in the red dress hotter than the one in the blue dress? Or is the one in the blue dress simply not hot?

Or are they the same woman?

If you said C, give yourself an A. You know a trick question when you see one.

Yahoo! Movies referred to the Jennifer Lawrence on the left as “the stunning blonde Oscar nominee…unveiling her new brunette do and posing in character as Katniss Everdene,” the starring role in the upcoming movie of The Hunger Games.

The Jennifer Lawrence on the right was billed as looking “almost dowdy—her curves covered up—in a simple blue dress and sneakers and seemingly little makeup.”

Which only proves you don’t have to be a Rhodes scholars to be a journalist these days.

I mean, really.

The first problem is the implication that if you’re a woman and you want to ugly yourself up, the first thing you need to do is hide up your gorgeous blondness with some yucky brownth.

Good luck with that one.

In a 2005 study at Florida State University, nearly half of the men who where shown pictures of women said the brown-haired ones were the hottest. With less than twenty percent of the vote, blondes didn’t even come in second—women with black hair did.

You might be tempted to pity the poor redheads, who got only seven percent of the vote.

But you’ll be dashing off to Walgreen’s in search of a box auburn dye if you believe Women’s Health magazine’s contention that redheads should “stock up on condoms” because “according to one study, they get a lot more action” than blondes or brunettes.

You know what they found at Florida State? That what men really want—when it comes to long-term relationships, at least—is a gal that looks like…themselves. And since most men have brown or black hair…

You do the math.

Anyway, the second problem with the Yahoovian logic is that a dearth of makeup and a plain blue dress are enough to make Jennifer Lawrence look “dowdy.” You know, the way wearing their hair up and putting on glasses turns supermodels into librarians.

Commenters ripped the commentary on the two Jennifers, calling it sexist and biased. But the two that get thumbs up each from me are, “Love the brunette look much better! I think it draws more attention to those beautiful eyes,” and, “The trained eye can still spot the rockin' hot bod 'neath the ‘dowdiness.’ I'd tear it up!”

Another guy, commenting another story at another website, though, got to the pith. “It’s all about variety,” he wrote. “If everyone had the same preference, we’d all be going after the same woman.”

The bottom line? Dowdy’s in the eye of the beholder. And, apparently, more than skin deep.

What was that again?

Somebody asked me how the rewrite is going, and I had to say that I’m having more fun rewriting Fast Lane than anything ever.

I always start out gangbusters, going from zero to sixty in a hurry no matter what I’m working on—screenplay, novel, short story—and then grinding it out in the middle. As the end comes into view, though, I pick up speed because the characters, who were formless and void at the beginning, start telling me things I need to know.

Lots of the time, what they tell me renders stuff from that gangbusters beginning irrelevant. Not a problem, since they also tell me what is relevant.

For example, the first time around I didn’t really know what Clay and Lara were going to say to each other right after they met, so I just wrote a bunch of description. Stuff like, “they talked about this and laughed about that,” without going into detail. Without even using quote marks most of the time. That made it easy to maintain my breakneck pace for the time being.

Of course, the people in my writers group all noted in the margins that they’d like to see what the two characters were actually saying. They were right. The only problem was, I didn’t know.

Slowly, but surely, Lara and Clay’s voices rang clearer and truer as the pages passed. They matured, in a way—and so did their relationship. Eventually, they talked differently with each other than with other characters.

So now I know what they say and how they say it.

Creating Lara and Clay and all the characters Lara meets on her journey has been a blast. And during this rewrite, I’ve even gotten to make up a couple more characters. That’s one of the great things about fiction: You get to just make up people you might like to meet. Or definitely would not ever want to meet. Either way, it’s fun. And in the process, the characters you create end up feeling real to you.

And, hopefully, to your readers—which is the whole point of rewriting. The icing’s on the cake; now it’s time to swirl it into aesthetically pleasing patterns.

So, anyway, that’s how the rewrite is going. And I think it shows on the page.

Brazilian? Hollywood? Sugar? We’re talking wax, right?

Reading in a writer’s group gives me an opportunity to show eight people just how ignorant I am every two weeks.

A couple of weeks ago, for instance, I read my first revamping of Fast Lane’s opening and was told I needed to show more of Lara’s transformation from plain old average Lara into Leading Lady Lara.

This transformation thing is kinda tricky, since the whole book is about one woman’s transformation. But I’m talking here about an initial transformation that Lara has to go through just to get to the next level. Preparation, more or less.

In man books, the lead character preps by doing a few push-ups, running an obstacle course and picking out the right machine gun. In woman books, according to my female readers, there is the need to show far more detail. Where does the heroine shop? What kinds of dresses does she try on? How much does she spend?

And the shoes. What about the shoes?

So I added all that, and then found out that Lara couldn’t just “go to the gym.” We had to know what exercises she was doing. And toning up wasn’t enough. She’d undergo a makeover: new hairdo, manicures, pedicures, professional wax jobs on various parts of her body. But just getting the wax jobs wasn’t enough. We’d have to know which parts and what type of wax.

So I added all that, too. And, you know what? Fast Lane got better.

It was with great confidence, then, that I read the re-revised opening to see if I’d covered all the bases. Well, yeah…but not necessarily adequately. This time, I was informed that Lara absolutely could not attend a party with Beautiful People in a dress that cost—be prepared to LOL, ManWARriors—$258.

“There’s no way she would go to that party in a dress that cost less than $2,000,” said Judy, my ultimate beta reader.

I added a zero after the eight. Problem solved.

But it also illustrates just what I’m up against. Only once have I spent more than $258 on a single piece of clothing. It was the Hart Shaffner & Marx suit I bought. In 2007. Having worn it only about two dozen times, I’m pretty sure it has at least four more years left in it, too. As long a wide lapels don’t roar back into style.

Anyways, all this thinking about fashion reminded me of an actual conversation I had with my mom after I’d attended the wedding of a high-school friend.

MOM: What did the bride wear?
DAVE: A wedding dress.
MOM: Well, yes. But what color was it?
What color was it? It was a wedding dress, for crying out loud. How many colors are there?
DAVE: White.
MOM: White-white? Off-white? Ivory? Cream? Eggshell? Ecru?
Ecru? There’s no such color as ecru.
DAVE: I don’t know, Mom. It was a white dress.

And then came questions about sleeves, shoulders, skirt length and gloves.

I was twenty-one at the time, and I’d apparently made little progress since. But now I know. So thank you, ladies, for educating me. And thank you, Internet, for making it possible for me to find a $2,000 dress without actually having to drag my butt to the mall.

The lesson? Do your research. A writer’s ignorance reduces a reader’s bliss.

Not just what the doctor ordered

My quest to better understand all things female has often led me down delightful paths. Just the other day I spent twenty minutes online looking for the perfect bustier, followed by another twenty minutes in pursuit of the perfect little black dress.

Both searches netted important details that made Fast Lane better. Honest.

On the other hand, I’ve been reading a little more “women’s fiction” lately, and I’m surprised at how someone getting sick—with cancer in particular—is so often an important part of the plot.

Or maybe not.

First of all, I’ve recently read were Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a stunning piece of journalism about a woman who died of cancer, and Michael Perry’s Population 485, a stunning memoir of an emergency medical technician. Not exactly “women’s fiction.”

Cancer rears its ugly head, though, in Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, as well as in Karen McQuestion’s A Scattered Life. I asked McQuestion about this, and she said, “I wasn’t aware that there is an overabundance of medical stuff in women’s books—just as much as is necessary to tell compelling stories of life and loss.”

This echoes Jan O’Hara, a romance writer, former physician and author of the popular Tartitude blog, who said, “We often read fiction to see heroic people cope with challenging situations, but we also want to see average people cope with common problems in heroic ways.’

For sure, medical themes abound in stories by the women in my writer’s group. One of them, Christi Craig, who’s read her flash fiction on the radio and blogs at Writing Under Pressure, said women may be drawn to write and read about medical themes because “so many procedures include a lot of poking and probing. It's all so disconcerting, we probably want to know how we each get out alive and with our dignity.”

Now, this is something every man should be able to empathize with. I’m talking about prostate exams. Then again, no one takes prostate exams too seriously. What male comedian doesn’t have a joke that starts with a doctor slipping on a latex glove?

In her book Cupcakes, Lies and Dead Guys, Pamela DuMond injects a few laughs into the subject with hilarious depictions of mammograms and cervical exams. “Humor is a great way to see your way past all the unpleasant stuff,” she told me. “A woman might bite your arm off during a 70% off sale at Nordies over a pair of Jimmy Choos. But that same woman would share a certain camaraderie with a sister over the indignities experienced during the majority of doctor visits.”

She said he uses humor to help her make it through doctor’s visits. “A couple of years ago I broke my arm. At the doctor’s office, the tech took my blood pressure. Apparently it was high. The doctor told me I high blood pressure. I responded, yes, I know, I just broke my arm.”

Maybe the issue is that no matter how scary the modern world can be, what with terrorism, environmental devastation and the prospect of being tossed out of our homes in a double-dip recession, there is still nothing scarier than cancer. Our own bodies plotting to do us in, sometimes silently until it’s too late. Or friends and family members get it.

I understand that fear, but I didn’t learn it from a woman. I learned it from my father, for whom every twinge in a body part not used directly for playing softball is a potential carcinoma announcing its presence.

So maybe women aren’t alone when it comes to medical drama. Sure, you can cite Terms of Endearment and Love Story, but you can also cite Brian’s Song and Up in the Air.

Plus, Craig noted that “mothers can't help but sit around sharing ‘war’ stories” about being in labor.” Anyone who knows me knows I loves to tell my own war story about the death of my right anterior cruciate ligament in a basketball game.

The number of women suffering similar injuries is on the rise, so it’s possible that—if you figure in prostate exams—I have more in common with more women than I initially realized. Lesson learned.

Still, I’d rather research camisoles and cocktail dresses than cancer and cholera any day of the week.

When a sex goddess speaks, I listen

If you’re looking for advice on how to succeed at something, you should make sure your source has some cred. That’s why whenever I see a promo for a late-night talk show’s tips on how to be romantic from the 23-year-old movie star of the month, I change the channel as quickly as possible.

But when Betty White comes out with a whole book on the subject, I’m all eyes. If you want to know how to work your goddamned computer, ask a child. If you want to know what makes a woman tick, ask a woman—even one who titled her book, If You Ask Me (And of Course You Won’t).

I am happy to report that some of what White says in a Chicago Tribune interview echoes stuff that ManWAR’s already covered, especially in the post called “List off” (March 31, 2011).

Q: Is it better to give a lady a handwritten letter, a dozen roses or jewelry?
A: Jewelry is lovely and the obvious answer. But I think a handwritten letter—a lot of guys don’t realize what that means.

She explains that her late husband, game show host Allen Ludden, gave her notes all the time during their eighteen-year marriage. “It’s those little romantic touches that tell a lady, ‘I like a lot of people, but you have a special place in my heart.’”

She also says that being polite is romantic, an idea other sources pooh-poohed. “The worrying thing,” Newlite TV.com said, “is husbands and boyfriends actually think they're being romantic when they let their partner watch their favourite soap on TV, but they're just being courteous.”

White’s take: “If you’re walking with your lady on the sidewalk, I still like to see the man walking street-side to protect the lady from traffic. I still like to see that a man opens the door. I like those touches of chivalry that are fast disappearing. It’s just polite.”

I’m also happy to report that White, who called herself “an incurable romantic” on Larry King’s show, is as enthralled with crashing waves as I am. She lived for a while in Oak Park, Illinois, not far from where waves pound the rocky shores of Lake Michigan. Living within blocks of the same lake for most of my life has instilled in me an appreciation for the way the interaction of water and granite can, if you stand close enough, engage all five senses at once.

The most romantic place in the world to take a lady, White says, is Carmel, California—specifically for the waves. Much of Fast Lane happens in Malibu, which, to my thinking at least, is still pretty dog-gone romantic. Same ocean, just different rocks.

At any rate, I find this this all encouraging. I mean, agreeing on such matters with a luminary who brings eighty-nine years of experience to the field of being romantic surely means I must be onto something.