I was working on a novel in which one of the main characters was a ren faire obsessive. I spent some time on rennie message boards learning about what true die-hards might be doing with their off-season time (apparently some people are sewing costumes, practicing speech patterns, and singing along to era-specific songs MONTHS before ye olde turkeye legges come out in full force), and I dove down multiple internet wormholes about what different classes of people might have worn, how to swear Elizabethan style, and how to construct your own hoop skirt.
But obviously that wasn't enough: I had to GO to one of these things. And since my mother is emphatically neither a dork nor the type of woman who dressed herself up for Halloween, too, the entire experience had never really been on my radar before.
What struck me then--and struck me even more forcefully yesterday, when I headed back to the faire just for fun--was the depth of storytelling that all these individuals are engaging in.
Most of them probably don't write it down or turn it into fiction (though I'd imagine rennie fan-fic is a thriving sub-genre...or it ought to be), but they're all doing deep character work any novelist could be proud of.
They know when and where their characters were born, how they speak, how educated they are, where and how (and if) they work, what kinds of special skills they might have and how they learned them--and for all these things, they have sub-stories: what happened that fateful day in the forge, or how a female managed to infiltrate the king's army, or why a fairy has chosen to pair up with a wandering apothecary (not everyone in a costume at a ren faire is this dedicated, to be fair(e), but MANY of them are).
They may or may not be writers, but they're feeding the same urge: the need to tell stories, to put oneself INTO a story.
All of which got me wondering: what do the stories we choose to tell say about us? Why choose to be the town drunk over the courtly noble? Why be a lady-in-waiting as opposed to a queen? Why choose a wizard over an elf over a fairy over a pirate? All of the people who are committed to creating a faire character are playing pretend: what does the type of pretend they choose to play say about their real, not-made-up selves?
And what does it say about those of us whose world of pretend isn't a faire ground, but a page (or a canvas, or an instrument)?
We may think we know why we tell the stories we tell--I, for example, will probably never write a fantasy, sci-fi, or otherwise world-building-necessary novel because I frankly lack the dedication to knowing a fictional space as deeply as you need to in order to make those genres WORK. When I write contemporary fiction, at least I know my readers have the same shorthand I do.
But why you tell a story isn't the same as what the telling says about you, the person. So what are our stories saying, not about themselves, but about us?
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