This week: Mix & Match: Creating Fantasy Creatures Edited by: Jayne  
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Creating your own mythic creatures can elevate your fantasy writing, offering a unique twist to your stories that can help you avoid tropes and keep your writing fresh. Developing hand-crafted creatures flexes your creative muscles and allows you to engage your readers and draw them into your unique world. You can even match them to the themes central to your narrative, allowing them to serve as metaphors for larger concepts.
How to Differentiate Your Creatures/Characters
Remember, developing your creatures isn’t just to have them have them in the background or as side quests. Your creatures can just as easily be the main characters in your universe.
To make your creature stand out, consider these options:
Physical Changes
Adapt the creature’s form to fit the environment of your story or to reflect its narrative role. An ice-dwelling griffin, nocturnal unicorn, or dragon-scaled bear can offer fresh perspectives.
Behavioral Traits
Introduce unexpected behaviors or social structures. Perhaps your normally solitary creature is now pack-based, or your typical herbivore now enjoys meat and hunts for it.
Unique Abilities
Beyond the usual flying or fire-breathing, perhaps your creature can manipulate natural elements or has psychic powers, providing new plot possibilities. It could be as simple as green frogs that photosynthesize or as complex as the ability to manipulate time. Whatever you change, always keep in mind how the new abilities relate to the story and integrate into the environment you’ve laid out.
Choose Your Base
If you’re starting out with building creatures, you can jump-start your imagination by working through some basic exercises:
Start With A Well-Known Mythic Creature
Dragons, mermaids, phoenixes, or giants are all fertile ground for reinvention. Describe the traditional attributes and roles of the creature you choose.
Alter the Appearance
Change the creature’s appearance to reflect different themes or environments. Determine how physical changes can influence the creature's perception and functionality.
Mix Cultural Influences
Blend elements from different mythologies to create a hybrid creature. For instance, combine the Norse Kraken with the Egyptian Sphinx to create a riddle-speaking sea monster. Combining elements like this enriches a creature’s backstory and symbolism.
Shift the Habitat
Place your creature in an unexpected habitat to see how it evolves. What would a centaur in a desert look like? How would it survive? Consider physical adaptions, interactions with other species, food and water sources, and their purpose there.
Combine Known Creatures
A compelling way to create something new is to merge characteristics from mythological beasts or real-world animals. The combinations should feel seamless and logical in your world, not an afterthought.
No matter which options you choose, be mindful to blend traits in a way that enriches your creature’s role in the story rather than simply smashing things together because they sound cool. Creatures still need to make sense and be functional where they exist.
Don't Forget the Lore
Your creature’s background is crucial, and coming up with a compelling backstory will make your creature more believable and integrated into its world. Lore includes origin myths, cultural significance, and interactions with the world around them. How do they interact with other beings? What are their societal structures? Lore offers consistency to your story, which can help drive plot developments and increase readers' engagement.
Work the Details Into Your Story the Right Way
How you incorporate your creatures into the narrative can make or break your story. Use it to advance the plot or to deepen character development. If your creature is central to the world’s ecosystem, show the impact of its behaviors and abilities on the setting and the characters. Ensure that every mention or appearance of the creature serves a purpose.
Make sure to work any necessary lore in over time and avoid providing details that don’t matter to the reader. A lot of what you come up with in terms of the creature stays with you and doesn’t make it to the page. Please do not give your readers ten pages of backstory all in one go. Most times, you’ll only detract from the story.
Watch Out for Copyright Concerns
While mythic creatures from folklore are generally in the public domain, modern interpretations in recent literature or media may not be. Avoid repurposing characters from contemporary works, and make sure your creations are sufficiently original. While it is true that " everything has already been done in some way,” you can still develop a creature that captivates your audience's imagination and remains unique enough to avoid complications.
Go ahead and step out of the standard-issue Box of Fantastical Creatures and see what you come up with. You might have an entire story waiting to be found on the wings of a new creation.
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Fantasy: June 19, 2024 Issue [#12538]
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