15/05/2025

wus good loam gang hibert 3 billion back at it again without an update to the website anyway here's a cool

Writing with a Seed

i don't think i've ever been good at making something completely original. if there is an elite sect of artists whose works aren't derived from anything at all, i am not a member. at the same time, i've been lauded for fairly "original" stuff over the years, even though i could point to what it was all inspired by with relative ease

the best example of me overcoming that lack of originality is in my worldbuilding. no matter how hard i try, i can't get started unless it's grounded in a real-world thing. motropolia is an obvious example, extrapolating world history until 2015 into a country i'd like to live in. somewhat less obviously but still hard to miss is the haven, which began life as a fucked-up version of the medieval low countries. my worldbuild for koze ba temes (page coming soon i promise!!!!) is japan 2, and my latest worldbuild (also using temes and i'm not telling you more) is basically low saxon soviet cyberpunk (oatjen gerroasjie mien jong)

so it goes with my characters. it's generally good writing advice that the world shouldn't serve the character. in taking that lesson to heart, i've found success in doing the opposite: making characters serve the world. i get way more of a kick out of writing when i'm describing the world, and the most "normal" way to do that is through the eyes of the character. as an example, my npc for a d&d one-shot i hosted last month is certainly an idiosyncratic sage, but he adheres to the customs of his culture (at least, i intend for him to do that)

in contrast to this, i feel as if any (experienced) writer could tell you that characters exist to serve each other, which together make the world. i struggle much more with this traditional kind of writing, especially if the protagonists are meant to be explicit larger-than-life heroes. in that scenario, they have literally nothing to say about the world. oh cool, there's this magic forest full of berries that make you immortal and only the protagonists can acknowledge its existence! Fuck you. Drink the city sewage like the rest of them, you pricks. Describe the taste like it's goddamn gourmet.

...umm, so as you can see, my patience runs a little dry when the world is nothing more than a plot device. i have more appreciation for the work that goes into exposition than i do for the rest of the plot

that all being said, once i have a character in the world, i can look at a character's needs and figure out what to do from there. this is me integrating the character into the worldbuilding process, making yet another starting point for a feature in the world. this is still a fairly solitary process, of course, but if this works for one, it ought to work for the others too

this, i strongly believe, is what makes something original enough. not just taking one source and running with it, but seeing what new ideas could be explored with the source, then adding another factor and seeing what can be done from there, rinse and repeat. naturalistic conlanging (just about) works this way, and so does my ideal workflow

the moral is this: don't sweat it when it comes to originality. if you've put work into it and you don't make it hyper-obvious, nobody can tell the difference. moreover, if you put effort into the system that makes your world tick, i will probably like it a lot more than if it's just "this exists because it's convenient". i say all this because that's how i do it

(though if you do it differently, that's fine. this isn't a criticism against you per se, just a consideration that i'm probably not your target audience, unless you make it fun in other ways)