Nurturing New Ideas

I’m a terrible gardener. Growing things takes a level of enthusiasm for houseplants that I simply don’t have. However, the very things I find impossible to give the mint dying on my apartment windowsill are the very things I find essential about nurturing a new idea.

Fuel

New ideas need the right fuel. Outside inspiration adds visuals, story telling techniques, and stylistic flourishes to your toolbox that can be applied in your own way. Inspiration takes many forms, like reading outside your genre, watching movies, taking walks, or talking to interesting people.

My dark, witchy fantasy Blightshade has shallow roots in an existing IP, (maybe more on that later.) But an original source of inspiration doesn’t have to be about recreation. More often, it can be a series of springboards that allow a new idea to go where the original idea could not.

Effort

No idea is conceived fully formed and while I would love to skip right to the final version, the process of tending an idea takes effort and experimentation.

Versions of the main cast of Blightshade spent a long time as characters in a long-running RP. There, between myself and my writing partner, we worked out the things that were most interesting about them, divorced them from their source material, and discarded anything that wasn’t necessary.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ”I’ve had the privilege to see this story grow from a rich but book-less cast of characters into the sharply defined individuals who carry the story of Blightshade on their tired shoulders.” -A.N.

Time

Time is perspective. Time is what it takes to sit with ideas and accept whether they’re good or bad and weed out the bad ones even if you’re attached. Time is pride in finishing something that may have taken five years but was made with your own hands and mind. New Ideas are worth the time they take to nurture. They’re worth the effort it takes to create them and the inspirations you seek out to inform them.

Early draft of Lorne and Sacha. Wanna tell me why both my protagonist and warm-up antagonist initially had pink hair?

Sharing Old Art

By old art, I don’t mean ‘art I’ve shared before’, I mean sketches of Lorne & Co. from days after the idea for Blightshade sparked. I mean art from when these characters were still a Russian nesting doll of bad ideas that I had certainly not unpacked. But stylistic missteps are a part of the journey.

Tahj and Vii didn’t change too much but Vii got a hairstyle better fitting an athlete and everyone had tattoos that failed to develop narrative significance.

What didn’t fail to develop narrative significance were Lorne’s scars. From my very first sketches I knew they would be important, although for what happened and where they came from, you’ll have to read deeper.

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Blightshade is Alison Wright's dark fantasy debut following Lorne, a vain witch with corrupted magic. Lorne's quest for a cure will expose his diseased powers, entangle his fate in a knot of unstable relationships, and force him to face the very monster that blighted him.