askchapo

In the development of my own interests and hobbies there was a good mix of...

• deliberately choosing to do things because I thought it would make it easier for me to make friends
• copying things I read in books, or saw in movies or on TV
• inertia from previous interests
• just the straight-up material conditions of my life

Most of my interests over the course of my life can be looked at from several of these angles.

For instance, one of the several factors that eventually culminated in me becoming a conlanger was that I read Captain Underpants when I was about 6 or 7 years old: because I read that book, I decided to try drawing my own little gag comic, in which a kid flushes the toilet in a public restroom, and then the poop comes out of the toilet in the next stall over, and then the kid in that stall flushes the toilet and the poop goes back to the first stall, and then the kids say in unison something like, "Talk about faulty plumbing!" — I drew that comic, and I resolved that I would make copies of it to distribute at the playground, just like George and Harold did, and then all my peers would come to me and beg me to draw more high-layrious comics, and I would make a name for myself and make a bajillion friends lickety split. 'Twas a foolproof plan!

...Well, I didn't end up making copies of that comic or even showing the original off to anyone, but I refused to let some initial hiccups like that dishearten me from seeing through my foolproof plan to take over the wor— I mean, make friends with my classmates!

And so I drew another comic strip.

And then another.

And then another.

I guess I was hoping I'd eventually make something good enough to distribute, which I never necessarily achieved, but I did go from drawing bad attempts at yonkoma, to drawing something closer to storyboards for bad short films with a recurring cast of characters, namely schoolkids loosely based on myself and some of my classmates. My comics were impressive by the standards with which we'd judge the artwork of little kids.

But yeah, in any case, a few years later I got caught up in the hype around space colonization and stuff, and so I decided to draw a comic where my characters got on a giant rocket ship to reside on an artificial "school planet" — yes, the same kids who were exchanging poop like a hot potato at the start of this comic series, were now astronauts on another planet. So I had in drawing that particular comic about the rocket, shifted the setting of my comic series away from basically just a copy of my own primary school, to a brand new world which I was free to develop in any way I wished. And develop it I did: I thought about how the schoolkids lived and got around, what sorts of zany misadventures and hidden secrets this planet held, what sorts of technology they had access to — and eventually I started drawing maps and flags and I coined names for the different regions of the school planet, because I'd imagined that the school planet setting could be used for a kid-friendly open-world video game (I was totally not jealous of the older kids for getting to play GTA!)

So yeah. That was my first real foray into worldbuilding, and later worldbuilding projects would lead me to start conlanging. There were of course several other factors that led to the interest in worldbuilding sustaining itself and developing further, and other factors that led me to move on from relexes and ciphers to developing actual constructed languages, but just this anecdote is plenty long by itself.