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My Step-By-Step Guide about creating original lore.
4 years ago
This is a guide on how to create a world and personal character lore alike.
Note: I might update sections if I feel they require a re-work or update.
I am creating this Guide and talk about the things which helped ME to create my own original lore. This may be different for you as every mind is wired differently.
My mind is heavily working through visual thinking. This makes it incredibly easy and natural for me to set up a scene and remember how everything works together as well as quickly fill in blanks if I notice them or someone else does.
So please, take this with a grain of salt and don't feel like you are incapable of creating lore yourself even if you don't have a strong ability of visual thinking. Every brain is wired differently, but all brains are able to be creative!
Step 1: PLANNING
Before coming up with any world or even just a character, make sure you know what you want and what you are capable of! This is an important step.
For example: If you lack knowledge of basic sciences, do not create a character working in these fields!
Even if it Sci-Fi, understand that Sci-Fi may be fiction, but the science of fiction follows rules. You would have to come up with reasonable explanations, otherwise, it turns into fantasy which is a different genre.
Working on your lore later on also becomes very mind-boggling and you might lose the drive or interest to work on it altogether, smashing your head against a wall as you fail to create reasonable lore.
Choose a topic and make sure it is something you know of, like and understand. You cannot be good at everything and that is fine! This is what makes lore unique from each other.
You should feel related to the character or world, giving you the ability to get a stronger feel for it altogether. Trust me that this step is the single most important step of all, it directly dictates how you will work on your lore later down the line. Lore in which you can relate with or understand becomes much easier to work with and filling out blanks as well as brainstorming answers to questions you have never thought of before.
Step 2: FOUNDATION
Do not rush your character or world development! Once you know what you want and what you are capable of, plan exactly what you want to make of it.
For example, You know you want to create something about Sci-Fi, you know about the laws of physics to at least a degree where you can make sense of things. (You don't need to be a physicist to create great sci-fi lore). But now you are working on the details. What is the setting? Is it a normal universe bound to the laws of physics as we know them? If not, explain how different they are.
What are the main characters of the lore? What do they look like? (This step is malleable. You are able to add new characters into your lore anywhere in the future. These will just help you to create a story later on if you wish to make one. It is optional)
What is your character doing in the lore? How does he look like?
In this section you are breaking down and creating the foundation of your lore, creating laws and rules in your lore which all future descriptions will follow. You are not writing a character profile description or in-depth world lore! You are explaining only the foundation upon which you will work; Segmented texts that all explain a single thing in the greater picture. If you forgot to mention anything in your lore or you come up with something new later down the line, it is fine to add small things but usually, it is not possible to remove them. Make SURE you have the main foundation set. You CANNOT change this if you already have an established foundation without re-writing your lore entirely.
Example: If you already created materials in your lore and explained how it functions and many of your lore related areas use this material, you can't just change its properties or remove it from your lore later on without serious re-writing.
If it is about a character, your character has a body that cannot be changed later on. Know how your character looks like during the foundation step! (While it is possible to change or re-write your character's physicality in later steps, it is generally inadvisable as it may create holes in other parts of your lore you are unaware of depending on how established it already is)
Regarding commissioning artists:
You might see that this step also sets the basis of what character info you may send to an artist. Show dedication in what you want! Search for references for the artist to work on. Do not allow artistic freedom with minimal description of your character... trust me that you may find happiness in what you got because it looks so great in the result but later on you scrap the character because you get out of the euphoria, realizing that you actually don't really like the design at all or are unable to relate to it.
So be thorough with the description of your character's looks! You may allow artist freedom on the character's position, though!
Step 3: CONNECTING THE DOTS
Once you have established the foundation of your lore and already know what exactly you wish to create, connect the foundation and build the walls.
In this step, you want to connect the dots of the foundation descriptions of your lore. The texts or thoughts you put into.
This step can get daunting and sometimes mind-boggling. Creating descriptions is one thing, but connecting them so they make sense of each other may be difficult.
If something becomes too unreasonable, you can still re-write or scrap something you have created during the foundation step. This step still allows you to do so. You are still not writing any character or world description past their looks.
Example: You have created materials in your lore and have already explained their properties.
You may have also written or thought of how the material comes to be, is created, or used in applications. You now want to connect these together and more thoroughly describe them by adding more flavor text if you wish. Make sure you read both texts fully again before combining them!
This step is necessary as you want to keep your Foundation texts as short and to the point as possible! If you write long descriptive texts in the foundation step about all kinds of different things in completely different areas, you will forget or make mistakes.
This is also why you do NOT want to write about how a character behaves, how the world behaves, etc, yet! If you create a mish-mash of descriptive text, it will cause problems to the point you may have to scrap what you have jsut written entirely because it makes no sense.
Step 4: DESCRIPTION
Be absolutely sure you are happy with the result of the previous steps as this step puts the roof on your work. You cannot tear down the foundation anymore. You may only be able to tear out some walls.
Now with the dots connected and your texts forming a thorough description about single parts in your lore, character looks, materials and their origin and so forth, you can start with working on psychological profiles of your character.
You might have already thought of it in previous steps unintentionally and that is good! That is part of the planning. You always want to plan ahead and think to make sure you are happy with it.
Now you get to actually put a fully descriptive profile of your character and/or your world.
There really isn't much to explain here. At this point, you can sort of go crazy with whatever you want.
You have already created the rules of your lore during the foundation step by writing about every single thing and have perhaps perfected it during the third step. Now you can write long descriptions about whichever you wish which follows these rules.
You may even add new encounters, and this is encouraged! For example, you may write about the homeworld of your character or that there is another empire at war with the one you are part of. Or you are just a rogue. All of them follow the rules which you have set during the foundation step, these just add more lore!
This step is also continuous, you can always add new and more descriptions, furthering your lore. You may even write stories once you have completed this step.
You may even remove parts of your lore, characters that you have added in this step so long as they don't have a foundational impact on everything involved in this step.
Example: I wouldn't remove an empire from the lore if it has a major role in your lore and possibly already has mentions everywhere in other descriptions.
Just like how removing the protagonist from a movie out of nowhere often ruins any following movies in the series in some way or another. Usually, it is not even possible to remove the protagonist.
Step 5: CHECKING/QUESTIONING
This step doesn't override Step 4. You can still go ham at step 4 and you should!
In this step, you always check if your lore still works in correspondence with anything you may have added! You want to do this frequently. It doesn't have to be thorough but it is good to create headlines for any text you may have written, giving you the ability to quickly see: "Ah yes, the text under this headline may need a few changes with what I have added elsewhere"
In this step, you are checking the descriptive texts you put up during Steps 2 and 3 for the most part or anything you added in step 4 which may have also been added in step 2 or 3.
It is usually safe to ignore psychological profiles, interactions between characters, or anything that is not something critical of the lore. These descriptions usually would have to actively be changed as other new descriptions of something else are unlikely to affect it.
Additional step: ADDING FOUNDATION
Yes, you may add a new foundation. You may even start from step 1 and work yourself back up as you added that foundation to your lore. Perhaps it is something like another universe? A different dimension with new laws?
Here I would say that during Step 3 you would be connecting those two lores together in addition to connecting the texts together of that new universe/dimension. Perhaps there is a safe gateway to that other dimension? But you have already thought of the consequence it holds to travel with one body to the other as the laws of physics are different in that dimension during step 2.
The Result:
You have now reached a completed lore. Complete does not have to mean there is an end! Complete could just mean this: You have a set foundation, yet are free to always add new things or not. The choice is yours.
For me, my lore never ends. I always add new things, characters change or integrate themselves with something new I have made. But the foundation is there, they are bound to the laws of physics and materials which I have added to my lore, described.
This sort of freedom, yet knowing the laws you have created and being bound to those makes it so fascinatingly interesting to me.
Hope this text can help some people. As I said, it might not work as well for you as it did for me. Plus, I might have not even written down everything I could have. I just wanted to write this right now, doing it all in one session cuz I am bored xD.
If you got any questions about anything, feel free to ask in the comments.
Note: I might update sections if I feel they require a re-work or update.
I am creating this Guide and talk about the things which helped ME to create my own original lore. This may be different for you as every mind is wired differently.
My mind is heavily working through visual thinking. This makes it incredibly easy and natural for me to set up a scene and remember how everything works together as well as quickly fill in blanks if I notice them or someone else does.
So please, take this with a grain of salt and don't feel like you are incapable of creating lore yourself even if you don't have a strong ability of visual thinking. Every brain is wired differently, but all brains are able to be creative!
Step 1: PLANNING
Before coming up with any world or even just a character, make sure you know what you want and what you are capable of! This is an important step.
For example: If you lack knowledge of basic sciences, do not create a character working in these fields!
Even if it Sci-Fi, understand that Sci-Fi may be fiction, but the science of fiction follows rules. You would have to come up with reasonable explanations, otherwise, it turns into fantasy which is a different genre.
Working on your lore later on also becomes very mind-boggling and you might lose the drive or interest to work on it altogether, smashing your head against a wall as you fail to create reasonable lore.
Choose a topic and make sure it is something you know of, like and understand. You cannot be good at everything and that is fine! This is what makes lore unique from each other.
You should feel related to the character or world, giving you the ability to get a stronger feel for it altogether. Trust me that this step is the single most important step of all, it directly dictates how you will work on your lore later down the line. Lore in which you can relate with or understand becomes much easier to work with and filling out blanks as well as brainstorming answers to questions you have never thought of before.
Step 2: FOUNDATION
Do not rush your character or world development! Once you know what you want and what you are capable of, plan exactly what you want to make of it.
For example, You know you want to create something about Sci-Fi, you know about the laws of physics to at least a degree where you can make sense of things. (You don't need to be a physicist to create great sci-fi lore). But now you are working on the details. What is the setting? Is it a normal universe bound to the laws of physics as we know them? If not, explain how different they are.
What are the main characters of the lore? What do they look like? (This step is malleable. You are able to add new characters into your lore anywhere in the future. These will just help you to create a story later on if you wish to make one. It is optional)
What is your character doing in the lore? How does he look like?
In this section you are breaking down and creating the foundation of your lore, creating laws and rules in your lore which all future descriptions will follow. You are not writing a character profile description or in-depth world lore! You are explaining only the foundation upon which you will work; Segmented texts that all explain a single thing in the greater picture. If you forgot to mention anything in your lore or you come up with something new later down the line, it is fine to add small things but usually, it is not possible to remove them. Make SURE you have the main foundation set. You CANNOT change this if you already have an established foundation without re-writing your lore entirely.
Example: If you already created materials in your lore and explained how it functions and many of your lore related areas use this material, you can't just change its properties or remove it from your lore later on without serious re-writing.
If it is about a character, your character has a body that cannot be changed later on. Know how your character looks like during the foundation step! (While it is possible to change or re-write your character's physicality in later steps, it is generally inadvisable as it may create holes in other parts of your lore you are unaware of depending on how established it already is)
Regarding commissioning artists:
You might see that this step also sets the basis of what character info you may send to an artist. Show dedication in what you want! Search for references for the artist to work on. Do not allow artistic freedom with minimal description of your character... trust me that you may find happiness in what you got because it looks so great in the result but later on you scrap the character because you get out of the euphoria, realizing that you actually don't really like the design at all or are unable to relate to it.
So be thorough with the description of your character's looks! You may allow artist freedom on the character's position, though!
Step 3: CONNECTING THE DOTS
Once you have established the foundation of your lore and already know what exactly you wish to create, connect the foundation and build the walls.
In this step, you want to connect the dots of the foundation descriptions of your lore. The texts or thoughts you put into.
This step can get daunting and sometimes mind-boggling. Creating descriptions is one thing, but connecting them so they make sense of each other may be difficult.
If something becomes too unreasonable, you can still re-write or scrap something you have created during the foundation step. This step still allows you to do so. You are still not writing any character or world description past their looks.
Example: You have created materials in your lore and have already explained their properties.
You may have also written or thought of how the material comes to be, is created, or used in applications. You now want to connect these together and more thoroughly describe them by adding more flavor text if you wish. Make sure you read both texts fully again before combining them!
This step is necessary as you want to keep your Foundation texts as short and to the point as possible! If you write long descriptive texts in the foundation step about all kinds of different things in completely different areas, you will forget or make mistakes.
This is also why you do NOT want to write about how a character behaves, how the world behaves, etc, yet! If you create a mish-mash of descriptive text, it will cause problems to the point you may have to scrap what you have jsut written entirely because it makes no sense.
Step 4: DESCRIPTION
Be absolutely sure you are happy with the result of the previous steps as this step puts the roof on your work. You cannot tear down the foundation anymore. You may only be able to tear out some walls.
Now with the dots connected and your texts forming a thorough description about single parts in your lore, character looks, materials and their origin and so forth, you can start with working on psychological profiles of your character.
You might have already thought of it in previous steps unintentionally and that is good! That is part of the planning. You always want to plan ahead and think to make sure you are happy with it.
Now you get to actually put a fully descriptive profile of your character and/or your world.
There really isn't much to explain here. At this point, you can sort of go crazy with whatever you want.
You have already created the rules of your lore during the foundation step by writing about every single thing and have perhaps perfected it during the third step. Now you can write long descriptions about whichever you wish which follows these rules.
You may even add new encounters, and this is encouraged! For example, you may write about the homeworld of your character or that there is another empire at war with the one you are part of. Or you are just a rogue. All of them follow the rules which you have set during the foundation step, these just add more lore!
This step is also continuous, you can always add new and more descriptions, furthering your lore. You may even write stories once you have completed this step.
You may even remove parts of your lore, characters that you have added in this step so long as they don't have a foundational impact on everything involved in this step.
Example: I wouldn't remove an empire from the lore if it has a major role in your lore and possibly already has mentions everywhere in other descriptions.
Just like how removing the protagonist from a movie out of nowhere often ruins any following movies in the series in some way or another. Usually, it is not even possible to remove the protagonist.
Step 5: CHECKING/QUESTIONING
This step doesn't override Step 4. You can still go ham at step 4 and you should!
In this step, you always check if your lore still works in correspondence with anything you may have added! You want to do this frequently. It doesn't have to be thorough but it is good to create headlines for any text you may have written, giving you the ability to quickly see: "Ah yes, the text under this headline may need a few changes with what I have added elsewhere"
In this step, you are checking the descriptive texts you put up during Steps 2 and 3 for the most part or anything you added in step 4 which may have also been added in step 2 or 3.
It is usually safe to ignore psychological profiles, interactions between characters, or anything that is not something critical of the lore. These descriptions usually would have to actively be changed as other new descriptions of something else are unlikely to affect it.
Additional step: ADDING FOUNDATION
Yes, you may add a new foundation. You may even start from step 1 and work yourself back up as you added that foundation to your lore. Perhaps it is something like another universe? A different dimension with new laws?
Here I would say that during Step 3 you would be connecting those two lores together in addition to connecting the texts together of that new universe/dimension. Perhaps there is a safe gateway to that other dimension? But you have already thought of the consequence it holds to travel with one body to the other as the laws of physics are different in that dimension during step 2.
The Result:
You have now reached a completed lore. Complete does not have to mean there is an end! Complete could just mean this: You have a set foundation, yet are free to always add new things or not. The choice is yours.
For me, my lore never ends. I always add new things, characters change or integrate themselves with something new I have made. But the foundation is there, they are bound to the laws of physics and materials which I have added to my lore, described.
This sort of freedom, yet knowing the laws you have created and being bound to those makes it so fascinatingly interesting to me.
Hope this text can help some people. As I said, it might not work as well for you as it did for me. Plus, I might have not even written down everything I could have. I just wanted to write this right now, doing it all in one session cuz I am bored xD.
If you got any questions about anything, feel free to ask in the comments.
