Hey everyone!
If you keep up with my fiancee’s blog, you’ll have read that we recently attended Anomaly Con, a Steampunk convention in the Denver, CO area. And as part of our time there, we were in costume!
Specifically, on Saturday Beck painted us up to be like robots! In fact, if you’ve never heard of them before, we were specifically ‘fan bots’ from the Steam Powered Giraffe music group and their fictional universe.
And I’ll say this…it was a unique experience for me, for many reasons. A couple of weeks before, Beck did a test run of my bot’s makeup on me, and it was a surreal experience when the makeup was done and I looked in the mirror.
I was someone else.
That’s how it felt. Like, for a moment, I seriously felt like I was the fictional character we had made up together, named L3GEND. And then interviews with characters from sci-fi and fantasy movies started playing through my head, about how they felt the same when they first got into the full makeup and costume from their characters.
In fact, we just went to the Denver Art Museum’s Star Wars Costumes exhibit, which is part of why I’m a day late on this weekend’s post. While waiting in line, they showed videos about the costumes, including Natalie Portman talking about how she felt donning Padme Amidala’s costumes, and it sounded like she had a similar experience.
And it got me to thinking something for writers…
Inhabiting Your Characters in Cosplay
I’ve toyed with the idea in the past, and Wayne Adams has even mentioned trying to find cosplayers to portray my characters at conventions when I have a booth.
But what if I worked on creating costumes for some of my characters, and actually wore them? Would this allow me to ‘get into their heads’ so to speak? More than I already am, any way?
In and of itself, that might not be enough reason to, but then there are the reasons of being ‘in character’ at cons when I have tables, not to mention, if the costume is impressive enough, it might garner more interest in the novels.
But I want to go back to the original point: inhabiting my characters.
Maybe doing so would give me ideas about different directions I could take their characters. Maybe even totally change the story direction, as has happened more than once already.
I can’t do this for all of my characters, but maybe the primary protagonists. Cardin Kataar being the most immediate character I’m thinking. But which costume? His tattered rags and worn out, mismatched armor from The Sword of Dragons? Or his newer armor from Burning Skies?
To be honest, that matters a little less than the actual prop itself, the Sword of Dragons…how in the world could I construct such a large weapon? Especially to make it acceptable to take to places like conventions, where they have very strict rules on what they will allow for prop weapons?
And then the armor itself…thanks to an artist I hired last year to start doing character sketches, I actually have a sketch of Cardin Kataar I could go off of for the armor. Could I learn to make the leather pieces myself?
It’s an exciting idea, but also a time-consuming one. I am intrigued enough at the idea that I might at least do some preliminary research into it.
What do you all think? An intriguing idea? Any authors out there ever do this before?
Thanks for reading! :)
-Jon Wasik
A Writer at Heart 