There is no single right way to find inspiration here.
You may simply enjoy exploring the site, following creative genealogies, reading, viewing, or listening to what other people have created until something catches your imagination. When a Seed makes you think, I want to do something with that, you’ve found your starting point.
For many creators, that may be all they ever need.
Others may come here looking for something more specific. You may be searching for fresh inspiration, trying to work through a creative block, looking for motivation to create again, or wondering how something you’ve already created might find a place within this community.
The Creator Guides are designed for those moments.
They aren’t instructions for submitting or publishing a Seed. If that’s what you’re looking for, please see Create an Inspired Seed, which walks through that process step by step.
These guides are about something different: finding more entry points into the creative ecosystem by discovering more ways to look at the Seeds already here and more possibilities for what you might create from them.
Look at a Seed From More Than One Direction
Most of us naturally approach inspiration through the kind of work we already create. A fiction writer may gravitate toward Fiction Seeds and, when something sparks an idea, think about writing another short story. An artist may see that same story and immediately imagine illustrating a scene from it.
Both are excellent ways to participate. They’re just not the only ones.
That writer might create a missing chapter, a character’s diary, a fictional newspaper article, an interview, a prequel, an alternate ending, or a completely new story based on one small idea from the original.
The artist might illustrate a scene, but could just as easily create a book cover, character portrait, map, movie poster, magazine cover, concept image, comic page, or an abstract work capturing the emotion of the story rather than anything literally described in it.
And those are only a few possibilities.
The individual Creator Guides explore these kinds of possibilities for different creative disciplines. They aren’t intended to tell you what you should create. They’re there when you want a little help seeing what else a Seed could become.
When You’re Looking for Inspiration
Creative block doesn’t always mean you’ve run out of ideas. Sometimes it means you’re looking at the possibilities from the same direction you’ve looked at them before.
Try browsing Seeds outside the categories you would normally explore. Look at a photograph as the beginning of a story. Listen to a piece of music and imagine a place where it might be playing. Read a poem and consider what its emotion would look like as an image. Take a fictional world and imagine what its advertisements, maps, newspapers, fashions, architecture, or music might be like.
The Creator Guides provide many more starting points like these. Use them as prompts, combine them, change them, or ignore them entirely once they’ve sparked a better idea of your own.
Their purpose is not to provide the answer. It’s to help get the creative process moving.
When You Already Have Work You Want to Share
The guides can also help if you already have creative work you’d like to publish here.
Every new Seed must have a genuine connection to an existing Parent Seed, including work you created before discovering this community. Sometimes finding that connection will be easy. Other times, you may need to browse existing Seeds and consider your work, and the Seeds you’re exploring, from a few different perspectives before finding a natural fit.
Once you’ve published your first Seed, something important changes: your own published Seeds can become Parent Seeds for your future contributions.
Submitting new work inspired by, related to, or naturally connected with your own previous work is perfectly acceptable. A photographer with a body of related photographs, a writer with stories from the same fictional world, or an artist with a series of connected works may find that the first Seed is the hardest one to place. After that, their own growing genealogy can provide natural entry points for additional work.
The requirement remains the same: each new Seed should have a meaningful relationship to its Parent. But that Parent does not have to belong to someone else.
Explore the Guides
Start with the Creator Guide closest to the kind of work you already make. It will give you ideas for approaching Seeds from familiar territory while introducing possibilities you may not have considered.
Then explore another guide.
You don’t have to become a photographer to benefit from seeing how photographers find inspiration. You don’t have to compose music to discover something useful in the way musicians think about mood, rhythm, and atmosphere. Another discipline may simply give you a different way to look at your own.
These guides will continue to grow as the community grows. If you discover an unusual way of responding to a Seed or think of a creative prompt that should be included, share it in the Community Discussions. The people using these guides should ultimately help make them better.
Browse. Experiment. Try an approach you haven’t tried before.
Sometimes inspiration finds you.
Sometimes it helps to go looking for it.