Creative Trunks

Quite a lot of things that I do involve creative energy.  Whether it is writing for this blog, my short stories, or working on my latest design project, I have to tap into a creative energy to be able to drive my productivity forward.  Creativity has never been something that I can demand from myself however, I have to be in the right mind set otherwise I find it difficult to get things moving.  When it comes to writing, the only way I can try and summon this energy is to write something I don't think is creative at all and then begin to vary it.  Through the process of adding variance and diversity to the work I am able to create a trunk and start branching off from it, exploring each new idea and seeing how far they will go.

This process is a lot easier with writing than it is with other things in my life, not least of all those things that are visual, as the only way to start creating something visual that you can vary is to use a technique known as greyboxing - this is where you use concept or placeholder art with the intent of replacing it with something better.  Those placeholder assets are often uniform and uninspiring.  They don't really serve well as a starting point for anything visual.

The same principle however is at work when you create complex artistic expressions.  Those who paint portraits for example often start with basic geometric shapes and then develop their artwork around those.  Whilst computer models share some of that form, they aren't as fluid and easy to manipulate.  To borrow a phrase, you have to reinvent the wheel every time otherwise you end up producing content that looks too similar.  For some projects like games that use a shared game engine this is excusable as there is an expectation of a shared visual style when you use the same engine, however with things that are linguistic in nature that's harder to incorporate.  Visually similar artwork is pleasing to the eye and the human brain is fond of patterns but there is a fine line between familiarity and predictability.  The former is preferred, but the latter is abhorred as it makes the content boring and rarely engaging.  From a linguistic point of view this is like the difference between using the same genre and narrative tropes and simply retelling the same story or using the exact same characters.

There are of course times when you want to intentionally extend the original, but without the new creation being part of the original.  This is perhaps best demonstrated in gaming through the modding community which modifies existing games to add new features, variance, or to add new content as an extension for further enjoyment.  In a literary sense this is best demonstrated by fan-fiction, which in the same vein attempts to take the existing work and extend it, adding new content or in some cases "fixing" things that the reader took issue with in the original.

Whether you use modding as an example, or fan-fiction I think both demonstrate the purpose of a trunk and branch mentality.  These are people who have a lot of creative potential but often have a lack of structure and inspiration to create things from scratch themselves.  They take that which already exists as a trunk and then branch off from it as it is much easier for them to channel their creative energy.

As a writer, one of the problems with using this approach is the issue of copyright and consequently the legal issues that abound from doing so.  Whether you publish the work for free or whether you sell it, in either case, if the originator takes issue or anyone involved in their production it can often lead to legal consequences and monetary cost so it's not worth pursuing.  Having said that, there are a few creative works which started off life as fan-fiction but were later reworked to remove references to the original content.  There are even theories about some creative works that never officially acknowledged this as the process behind their development but is widely believed to be the case.  I can't name any for legal reasons as it can be construed as libel to accuse someone of plagiarism when you don't have enough evidence to back up the claim.  If you have ever delved deeper into the development process and seen the background to some productions however then you will likely be aware of examples, you could probably name about 50 of them with ease, each using varying shades of complexity in their writing to mask their use of an existing universe and established characters as opposed to grey boxing.