980,000 Photos, 300 Faires, and What I Learned About Writing

Over eight years, I attended more than 300 renaissance festivals. I took roughly 980,000 photos of faire performers, belly dancers, jousters, pirates, and everyone in between. Dancers and performers hired me to shoot them. I wasn’t there as a casual visitor. I was there with a camera, observing everything, and what I learned about framing, senses, and characterization changed the way I write.

Most advice about finding story inspiration tells you to “go somewhere interesting and take notes.” That’s fine as far as it goes, but it misses the deeper lesson. Spending years photographing performers taught me things about writing that no craft book ever did.

What Photography Teaches About Characterization

When you photograph someone, you’re making decisions about who they are in a fraction of a second. Which angle shows their personality? What’s the detail that tells the story — the scar on their knuckle, the way they hold a sword, the specific tilt of their head when they’re listening? You learn to see people the way a writer needs to see characters: not as a list of physical traits but as a collection of specific, telling details.

At a ren faire, every performer is already in character. The pirate leaning against a post isn’t just wearing a costume. He’s chosen how he stands, how he talks, what he does with his hands. The belly dancer isn’t just moving. She’s controlling exactly what the audience sees and when they see it. After photographing hundreds of performers across 300 faires, I stopped seeing costumes and started seeing characters. I started noticing the details that make a person specific rather than generic.

That translates directly to writing. A character described as “a tall woman with dark hair” is nobody. A character described by the way she adjusts her bracelet before she speaks, or the specific way she scans a room starting from the left, is someone the reader remembers. Photography trained me to find those details instinctively.

What Faires Teach About Senses

A camera only captures one sense. Standing in the middle of a ren faire, you’re hit with all of them simultaneously. The smoke from a turkey leg vendor mixing with incense from a jewelry booth. The sound of a hammered dulcimer layered over crowd noise and the crack of a jousting lance. The specific weight and texture of a hand-forged pendant. The taste of mead that’s too sweet and the taste of mead that’s exactly right.

Writers are told constantly to “use all five senses.” The problem is that most writers work from memory or imagination, and both tend to default to sight. Spending years in sensory-rich environments rewired my defaults. When I write a scene, I don’t have to remind myself to include sound and smell and texture. Those details show up because I spent eight years in places where they were impossible to ignore.

The faire environment is particularly useful because it layers historical and modern sensory details in ways that create interesting friction. A woman in full Elizabethan dress checking her phone. The smell of a blacksmith’s forge drifting into a performance space where someone is singing a medieval ballad into a wireless microphone. These collisions between eras are the kind of details that make fictional worlds feel lived-in rather than designed.

What Performers Teach About Scene Construction

Belly dancers and stage performers understand something most writers have to learn the hard way: every moment is framed. A dancer decides what to reveal and when. She controls the audience’s eye. She builds tension, releases it, builds it again. She knows that the pause before a movement can be more powerful than the movement itself.

Photographing performers for years taught me to think about scenes as controlled sequences of attention. Where is the reader looking? What am I revealing and what am I withholding? When do I slow down and when do I accelerate? These are the same questions a performer answers instinctively through movement, and they’re the same questions a writer has to answer through pacing and detail selection.

A good performer also understands the difference between spectacle and engagement. The flashiest move isn’t always the most effective one. Sometimes the quiet moment — a glance, a shift in posture, a held breath — lands harder than the dramatic gesture. I learned that from watching dancers, and I apply it every time I write a scene that could go loud but works better quiet.

How to Actually Use a Faire for Writing

If you want to use renaissance festivals or historical reenactments as writing fuel, here’s what actually works based on years of doing it.

Bring a journal or your phone and write observations, not ideas. Don’t try to invent a story on the spot. Write down what you actually see, hear, smell, and feel. “The juggler’s hands are scarred and his left pinky doesn’t bend” is more useful than “what if the juggler is secretly an assassin?” The specific observation is raw material you can use anywhere. The invented scenario is a dead end you’ll forget by Tuesday.

Watch the performers who aren’t performing. The best character details come from the moments between acts, when the pirate drops character and checks his phone, when the dancer stretches her ankles before going on, when the knight adjusts his armor and winces because something pinches. Those unguarded moments are where real human behavior lives, and real human behavior is what makes fictional characters believable.

Go more than once. The first visit to a faire is overwhelming. You see everything and remember nothing specific. By the third or fourth visit, you start noticing patterns, details, and the small things that make each performer distinct. The same principle applies to any environment you’re using for research. Familiarity is where the real material lives.

Images from Renaissance Festivals

Here are some photos I took during faire visits. Each one represents the kind of observation that feeds writing.

What does her expression tell you? What’s she looking at that you can’t see? One photo, a dozen possible characters.

A dancer controls exactly what the audience sees. Watch what she chooses to reveal and what she holds back. That’s scene construction.

Objects tell stories. Who made these? Who buys them? What does someone’s choice of jewelry say about them?

He chose this character. How he stands, what he does with his hands, where he looks — that’s characterization in real time.

Modern details in a historical setting. The friction between eras is where interesting scenes live.

Sakuntala. Notice the bells on her ankles, her eye line, what’s happening behind her. Observe with all your senses. Write down the questions, not the answers.