Creation is difficult.
The creation of a place like Leithu can be a struggle. Sure, sometimes there are full dumps of content and ideas that flow out of my brain and hit the page with a rhythm that is just on point, and they sometimes seem to come from another place altogether. But those dumps of info are just streams of consciousness and ideas that are in raw form. It’s hard to come up with a new world that is rich and full of all of these details that all intertwine cleanly to make a creative harmony that is needed to be considered “viable”. To create something tangible and believable, they have to interconnect on some level. That’s where the real work comes in.
Creatures, biomes, townships, human minor characters, back story, history, politics, lore… That’s all the boring stuff that helps create a believable universe. Critical thinking and planning are needed to tie everything together during world creation. I have found that what helps me is to go back to my D&D days from the 80s and 90s and seek out some of the content development tools I used then to help me flesh out ideas. A lot of tools exist online, like town generators and NPC generators. I sometimes use them as inspiration, but it’s more to fuel the framework with which I design my world.
All I know is that when I seem to be ‘on’ it’s hard to turn it off. And if I’m ‘off’, the inspiration to turn it back on is only a video game, book, or movie away. Inspiration and motivation come from a wide range of places. Being open to the ideas and allowing them to develop organically is the key to my own success. Hopefully, this helps understand some of my thought process in the creation of the world of Leithu.
