The Ouroboros of Art

06 Jun, 2024

Introduction

Lots of creatives don't know how to be inspired by things.

Luka Rejec's Ultraviolet Grasslands self-describes as being inspired by psychedelic heavy metal. How do you take music, a media form notably distinct from TTRPG writing, and turn it into something as realized as Ultraviolet Grasslands? On that note, how do you take anything you like in any media and turn it into something worth reading? I’ll show you the way that I think people ought to approach being "inspired" by any given thing¹.

We’ll start off with a quick guide on what to consume, then talk about best practices for media consumption, and finally end with how to take what inspires you and put it into something you create.

Dying of Consumption: What to Consume…

So you've started consuming media. Or, if you're like most people, you were thrust in front of a TV/Book/Phone/Computer from a young age and have been consuming media for as long as you can remember. Either way, you'll quickly find that there are lots of options, each of them vying for your attention as much as possible.

There is a lot of genuinely good media out there made by talented people. There are also a lot of terrible, brainless things out there that were created purely to drive the machine of capitalism.

If you're of a certain age, you were probably told at least once that "all reading is good reading."

This is a lie.

Reading (really consuming any media, but I'll use reading) is like nutrition. The things you eat affect your health, your mood, and your bowel movements. In a similar way that eating fast food multiple times a day does very little to extend your lifespan, reading erotica on Wattpad or Ao3 does frighteningly little to extend your creative output as a writer. You can enjoy it, of course; fast food is delicious! But no one honest is going to say that most erotica builds their writing chops, or that fast food helped them get healthier.

Franz Kafka is often quoted as saying "A book must be an ice axe to break the sea frozen within us." Kafka is hitting on something besides ice in that quote. When you read good things, it changes you. Most genre fiction just doesn't really have this effect on you. When you read vapid things your brain doesn't grapple with the ideas presented therein. That grappling will come into play once we actually start writing.

Read the classics. Visit your public library and grab that one author who you have in your head right now when you think of the word "classic". If you don't have a library nearby, visit Project Gutenberg. If you're a history person, pick a region of the world you know nothing about and find a textbook on it. If you hate old books or find the writing too dense (which is an understandable issue to have if you've consumed YA fantasy for the majority of your life) go back to the classics of your favorite genre; the rise of genre as a marketing concept, especially with Science Fiction and Fantasy, coincided with stories becoming shorter and easier to understand. Below are some of my personal recommendations for Science Fiction and Fantasy; I am nobody. My word means nothing. Read (or consume) whatever you want, so long as it's good.

Science Fiction

• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
• Nightfall and Other Stories by Isaac Asimov
• Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
• Burning Chrome by William Gibson
• Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer

Fantasy

• A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare
• The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath by H. P. Lovecraft
• The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
• Redwall by Brian Jacques (required reading for the aspiring Mausritter authors!)
• The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison

Section Summary

You're probably not consuming thought-provoking media. Consume widely and with intent.

…And How to Consume it.

So you've picked out a "good" book (or media, but sticking with books). Now what?

Well, you read it. Duh.

There's nothing special about this part. Just read it. Seriously. Really pick it up and grapple with it. There are themes and ideas explored beyond the individual events of each page. Find them. Think about them. Engage with them. If you've picked a good enough media, and you do this enough, you'll have thoughts about what you read. They might be good thoughts, might be bad ones. If it helps you think, write them down by hand in a journal. Cross out bad thoughts. Circle good thoughts. Engage in dialogue with yourself and what was written. The important thing is that you have thoughts. If you read a book and don't have thoughts about it, your book isn't good enough. Return to the previous section. If you pass GO, do not collect $200.

Section Summary

Have thoughts about what you're consuming and take what you're consuming seriously on its own grounds.

How to Create that Which You Consume

So you've finally consumed something worth consuming and you're giddy with the prospect of writing it. You have so many thoughts that you want to share with your work and have probably forgotten about this blog post entirely.

That is the worst time to create something.

There's a phrase in existentialist philosophy that goes "Existence precedes essence." In the original context, it essentially means that human beings exist before they have a purpose (essence) and through their life they shape their essence in real time based on how they live.

When you write after consuming media you really enjoy, the essence of something you create always precedes its existence; you're trying to capture the effect that consuming that media had on you and what you think it was that created that effect. This creates work that is derivative at best and poorly executed at worst. We're trying to be inspired, not make a port.

Instead, by waiting for a while (or making a conscious effort not to allow what you've read recently affect your work) the essence of your work arises naturally through what makes it onto the page after traveling across your mind's landscape . Your mind's landscape is formed by, you guessed it, the impact craters from all the grappling you're supposed to be doing with the things you consume and read about. Even if it feels as though you're coming up with entirely new things, they're actually the product of everything you've ever consumed. Being inspired by any particular thing, when it isn't used as a marketing term, is just making a conscious effort to highlight and show that particular region of your mind and your thoughts that resulted from that. You're pointing to the specific impact crater that got made when Gandalf fought the Balrog in Moria. Or, in Luka Rejec's case, the impact crater that psychedelic metal left on his mind.

Section Summary

Don't let your work be about anything other than your own thoughts. Those thoughts are influenced by the works you read. Your work should not be directly influenced by something else. It should always be filtered through your own thoughts first.

Conclusion

Being inspired by something doesn't mean talking about it all the time and including tons of references to it throughout your work. It's being changed by your inspiration so deeply that your own work would not be your own without the effect that your inspiration had on you.