What inspired you to write? To make your characters, to pour your passion into this medium of fantasy and roleplay? It’s a place of pure imagination, unfettered by the woes of our real world, a place where you can escape and project your ideas.
It could be an author, a family member, or even something as simple yet important as a flower or a mountain top.
For me, it was Kentaro Miura and Berserk. Without this author and his dark fantasy genre-establishing epic, I would not be half the writer I am today. I doubt I’d even be here. There’d be no Sint, none of that.
If something’s done that for you, might you share it with us?
I don’t think I could really pinpoint any specific thing. Thinking back I find I’ve always been interested in narratives, even in places where there was little. I think the time I started writing things for myself was around high school, mainly out of a mixture of boredom and procrastination. Driven by those I drew from what excited me most around that time and wrote lore based on that and what few relatively original ideas I could generate.
I suppose one could say that video games, and to slightly lesser extent anime, were my original inspirations. Most of what I wrote about included elements from games I either played or wanted to once I saw things about them. To an extent not much has really changed, other than the pool of sources and my own methods of recording things. Once I tried making something of my own out the things I thought were cool I just…never stopped, I guess. Most recently I became inspired by Eternal Champion’s latest album to develop something based on a concept I came up with years ago, which itself was based on Witchblade (the anime).
People tell me I couldn’t while also telling me my composition is pleasant to read. So I began to write.
A player told me my D&D homebrew campaign was lackluster once. They DM’ed the next one and made it three sessions before tapping out saying they didn’t have the time to commit to world building. So I invited them to my next homebrew we scheduled a week later.
Even have a dedication in my book for the teacher that told me I would never write one; telling him where he can shove that golf trophy he got in college.
Edit: Also the quote I heard somewhere: “If you want to read a better book, write it”. The original quote that is much less spiteful is attributed to Toni Morrison, but I found a spite version somewhere and went “Yeah, I’ll do that.”
Growing up, fantasy had always been my jam. There’s many different stories that I imagined (and still do!) myself or my characters going into and living those events. How would I do things different, how would much I keep the same, and so on. I even tried my hand at writing a fantasy story; I lost the draft I had but I bet it was really bad, given I was 15-16.
My first introduction to roleplay (outside of self-written stories about my Runescape character) was the Middle-Earth Online forums (You may know it by its true name, LotRO). I admit a lot of what I put to paper (or forum) was pretty cringe. My insert was whatever I felt like. Over time, though, I developed a better style and learned to make more nuanced characters.
Now I keep inspired mostly in thought, sometimes in writing. The same idea of escapism and revisioning a story are still there, but instead of “hey how neat would it be if my pandaren was the 10th member of the Fellowship of the Ring because there were 10 ringwraiths” its more “how would this world react if X happened instead of Y, and how would that change the story?”
Maybe I’d even revisit my old story idea, but uh…I think I should abandon the 12 story saga. Getting one book done is more of a struggle.
Lord of the Rings Online, I feel like, was a huge gateway for a lot of people.
That game’s RP community is an unsung hero. There’s so many extremely dedicated writers over there that truly commit to being a part of a world, to the point where it’s sincerely awe inspiring.
Also, don’t give up on your broader ambitions! Just… try to make one story at a time. It’s super tough when you’ve got so many ideas, and I know how tough it is, but try to make one mostly self-contained story at a time. Keeps things realistic, and also gives you wiggle room just in case you find yourself moving on to something else.
Harry Potter and Percy Jackson are what set the seed in my mind that I wanted to write.
Opened the books, read the series and then just continued reading other series until my brain got to the point and was like “I wanna make my own for funsees!”
I’m really bummed out about Miura too. I didn’t get into Berserk like most people until much more later in my life and there’s still a lot I haven’t read but I enjoy his work and can clearly see how he inspired so many people out there. The reason I got into his work is because so many creative peers sighting Berserk as a huge source of inspiration for them.
As for myself, I’ve always been a day dreamer and a doodler. It wasn’t until now in my adult life did I get diagnosed with ADHD and doodling on my school work was a coping mechanism for my ADHD to keep me focused but even now in my adult job I choose to write my notes in a notebook because I can still doodle which helps me focus and retain information better without zoning out and realize I tuned out the whole conversation because I’m thinking about that tiktok with the cat trying to eat the lady bug painting.
Anyway I have more ideas in my head for things I want to draw than the time to draw them. I listen to a lot of music and it’s a mix of lyrics and the beat and the style that will sometimes help fuel ideas in my head to draw. Which then leads to writing because I then try to come up with a story for whatever I’m drawing.
As for RP, it actually wasn’t until I started playing classic recently did I realize that WoW had a lot of RPG elements that just made me want to throw myself into the world. I think going back and playing classic (and now TBC) has helped rekindled my interest in RP.
I’ve always liked reading about worlds and experiences that weren’t my own. I’d say the earliest example of this was my fascination with dinosaurs: the fact that this world we’re so familiar with was once completely different. Different atmosphere, different kinds of plants, and animals. Absolutely no humans. Totally alien, but still the same planet.
So I’ve always been interested in learning about what’s going on beyond my current sphere. I’ve always enjoyed reading about the sciences, especially the life sciences and seeing the millions of ways life can exist. Or history/mythology and learning about all the countless ways people have lives. Or reading about different cultures and politics all the countless ways people live/think right now.
Sci-fi/fantasy fiction is naturally an extension of all that. You take the countless ways things have/do/could exist and create a whole new world. Along the way, I got interested in the actual craft of writing. How the way we choose to tell stories communicates the countless way we see the world.
I consider reading/writing/storytelling less of an escape and more as a way to learn more about other people I normally would never get to meet.
For me it was the Aeon Flux cartoons on MTV’s Liquid Television. I loved the action-packed silent film format where there was no continuity and she usually died at the end.
I’ve loved fantasy for as long as I can remember, and I’ve always had a burning desire to create that I can’t quell even in my adult life, even when I could be doing more quote unquote “productive” things with my time. I enjoy lots of books and movies and video games, but I think the two biggest things that set the stage in my early formative years were Pokemon and Scooby-Doo. Even if I have come to love others things more than those two as an adult, I can easily credit my love of fantastical creatures and locales to the former and my love of mysteries and the paranormal to the latter.
Inspiration to write is rather difficult for me to pinpoint. I’ve been reading since I was extremely small, finished the entirety of the Hobbit by age 7, mastered reading comprehension at a college level by the time I was in middle school, and yet I was always an extremely picky reader. I had a taste, nay, a THIRST for fantasy and fantasy settings that were grounded by a certain set of conditions that few concepts really abided by. To this day I still don’t know what those conditions are, and I fear with how often my tastes shift, I may never fully understand the what and why.
Because of a desire to try and figure out my own taste in storytelling, I suppose I started creating worlds in my mind, which inevitably would wind up on paper. Go figure, I was poor at writing at the start despite my boast with reading. But I realized the more I wrote, the more I understood about myself. Plotlines that sounded terrible on paper still carried with them a weight and desire for something in my life. Power fantasy was merely a reflection of my frustration with how helpless I felt about the world around me, melodrama was my un-matured ability to process grief and sorrow. Writing about these things and getting better at presenting them in ways that felt less…forced onto paper, and more natural, always seemed therapeutic, and aided me greatly in changing my mind, my views, and battling my insecurities. As my writing improved, so did I.
I thus feel writing aided me in maturing as a person, allowing me to tackle a lot of challenges I would have otherwise been ill prepared for mentally as an autistic individual in a system that was ready to spew me onto the streets with little to no assistance past high school. Bit of a run on sentence, but all truth.
So, in short, if there was one thing that inspired me to write above anything else, it would be my desire to better myself and connect with my own thoughts. Through that desire and drive, I found improvement in both my writing and my own life, and it’s only continued to get better.
It’s always been there. Some of my earliest conscious memories are of vivid daydreams. As a kid I was big into Lego and action figures and would play for hours, alone or with friends, making up stories. Or playing outside and imagining we are ninjas or Power Rangers or Pokemon masters or whatever. My dad is a bit of a nerd too so I grew up with Atari and NES that he had bought for himself before I was born and I remember playing those a lot, and I think gaming, especially back then, really ignited the imagination. (“What if the game was like THIS instead?”) We also had a lot of nerdy movies in the house for that reason.
I think the first time I actually put pen to paper - for fun and on my own time - was when I was 12 or 13. I was heavily into Diablo 2 at the time. I remember being home sick from school and wanting to play but there was an internet outage (and I was kind of done with single player.) I remember wanting to play really bad, and that lead me to writing a Diablo fanfic. I kept working on it for a few years, and even had a completed novel by the time I was in high school. I’m sure it was garbage, but it felt epic at the time. I unfortunately lost it because I was dumb and didnt back it up. It’s still in my noggin, one day I should try to rewrite it.
But from there I got really into writing, RPs, etc. In college I dated a girl and a little into the relationship she confessed she was into… forum RP. Haha it was kind of funny that we had found a connection and had the same nerdy secret.
I don’t write that much any more. Sadly. Adulting and such. I wrote a little vignette for a D&D character I made a few weeks ago, and that was fun. Every year I say i wanna do nanowrimo but i never do or stick with it.
I always loved reading and writing. As a kid, an old typewriter inspired me the most. Just the physicality of it, a direct connection to the rapid execution of both creative and non-creative work.
I grew to love how diverse writing is. The rhythm of poetry, the way metaphor links the abstract to the real, allegories, alliteration, assonance, structure and the satisfaction of a good reversal and resolution.
Also as a profession. Fiction is great, and there’s such a great vibe to plotting out a new story, how it takes hold of your life. So is commercial work, just the rush of beating a control with your copy, selling out an event, naming a product or brand. Watching a post spark conversation between strangers from different parts of the world. Transforming legacy content into modern tools.
Just knowing you can achieve so many things with one skill. Entertaining people with stories, moving people with poetry and music, writing speeches that inspire crowds, winning grants to build amazing things that benefit society, behaviour change marketing, testing copy and creating automated emails that help people enrich their lives with great products, fighting disinformation, raising funds for worthy causes – it goes on and on.
I dunno. I’ve tried but as soon as I impose a tight deadline like that on myself some kind of obnoxious executive dysfunction kicks in and I end up writing exactly zero words, I’m lucky if I finish an outline.
My dad, he always read books to me when I was little. Books in general, as well as my dreams; later other inspirations came in the form of movies and video games.
Though, these days I mainly just RP on WoW. I still write in word docs on the side from time to time but I can’t seem to get far anymore, which is a bit frustrating.
I don’t know why but I vibe with this. If I give myself a deadline, I don’t ever meet it. But if I don’t give myself a deadline, I write at the bare minimum 2000 words a day.