Indie Inspiration - Crafting New Media
Transcript:
We need new media. Books, short stories, comics, films, animations, games - everything we can think of. This isn’t a secret in 2023, if it ever was. The only people who don’t seem to grasp this need (or care to take action on it) are those with the funds and connections to build massive productions or push smaller projects into the popular spotlight.
That’s okay, we can do it without them, and many are.
But there are always creatives out there who have a hard time finding the way forward, and even the more self-assured of us lose perspective at times. So today I want to take a few minutes and express what I think is required to craft new media, and craft it well.
The basics:
Passion is a must, but it’s also naturally present in most creatives I know. Our first chance to elevate our work comes in letting the passion consume us, perhaps to a degree that feels a little reckless, a little vulnerable. Let the fire rage - don’t tamp it down - and then direct its power with:
A plan. One small word for a lot of indispensable work. Planning includes everything from plotting a story, storyboarding a comic, or adding to your worldbuilding bible, to arranging your website, laying out a daily work schedule, or firing up a marketing strategy. Lack of a plan is lack of direction, which can lead to creative slowdown or even paralysis. Goals both big and small deserve a solid plan.
Consistent action. Even with low spirits, complete disorganization, and a single digit IQ, we can eventually build a piece of art through sheer force of will via consistent action. 200 words a day gets you a novel in a year. A panel a day could get you a comic book in half that time. Get up and get to work!
Beyond the basics - Elevation:
This is where Iron Age, Pulp Rev, Superversive, and any other revitalizing 21st century creative movement will come into its own and build a lasting legacy.
There are a number of elements we can place under the umbrella of artistic elevation:
Differentiation - making sure that our projects aren’t just following a trend, but generating fresh variety. We don’t want to make ‘the next Harry Potter’. We want to craft new IPs that serve our demographics. And if one should rise to HP’s heights or greater, who’s to complain?
Iteration - building new art off the untapped potential of any given genre or medium. What’s something that could be done in game development that isn’t? Some day I will earn the time to finish my cyberpunk metroidvania life-sim 2D platformer, but you can start on your dream today.
Synthesis - creating new and exciting subgenres or genre-bends that might one day develop into their own thing (one massive example of which is litRPG). Yes, you could write a standard military science-fiction tale with all the tropes that entails, or you could be like Wargate Books and build a fresh brand combining isekai and portals with bands of brothers.
Collaboration - breaking free of the shackles much of old media has placed on itself by overly isolating IPs and creators from one another. New media doesn’t have to be confined to a million lonely universes or even so-called multiverses or metaverses. There is an OMNIVERSE of brilliant creations in our future, waiting to be built.
Optimism - this I think is crucial to building the creative foundation of human media for the next century or more. Materialistic hedonism, grimdark nihilism, and anti-hero worship come around from time to time, will again, and always have their appeal to enough of an audience to gain traction. But none of these do much for the genre and media they’re set in except to be the compost for a fresh crop.
A positive outlook on the past - finding the Good and True in what has happened that can’t be changed - and on the future - harboring Hope that the work of good people will bring us through the current troubles into better times - is unarguably the best way to populate our culture with stories that matter. Ideas that change people, challenges to make them grow, new pillars of cultural canon that may well become the Star Wars, Dragonballs, or Lord of the Rings of the latter half of this century and beyond.
This optimism doesn’t mean that we can’t write tragedies, that we can’t take our characters and players into the depths of despair and the loneliness of having lost everything. A song of all Major chords is as lacking in nuance and style as one of all minor tonalities - really only useful as an experiment. This optimism means instead that, whatever our vibe and themes in any particular work, we pick some noble Virtue to display and reveal, through story or image, how good and important it is.
The period of mass-refined creativity may be ending - it’s certainly shaken. It’s time for a beacon of raw light to lead people out of the doldrums and into new adventures not moored to the fast-food Mc-Recent Past.
Determination and Dominance:
Take the Good, Right, True, Beautiful and Cool from the things you know and love, preserving every element worth remembering a thousand years from now, and bring them into your works as you craft new things. Don’t forget Star Wars, but don’t be overly attached. Don’t roll your eyes at Dragonball, but learn what made it a stalwart across at least three generations of young men from many nations. Don’t merely ‘write your own Lord of the Rings’, but imitate Tolkien’s passion for the world of imagination he set out to create.
While ‘they’ milk that galaxy far far away for money and streaming views, I’ll write Revelation Galaxy, where corporations and false gods are in for a nasty surprise. While Goku is learning to make the Super Saiyan Peppermint transformation, or Spawn suffers to defeat his next cosmic entity, you’ll put new characters on the page that will be the NECA statues of the 22nd century. And while controversy over further adaptations of Tolkien’s legacy rage on, we will together craft not just our own Middle Earth, but an OMNIVERSE.
Here is my humble offering, for the enjoyment of my fellow humans, to the God of my creations.