I have most things about my universe figured out and the only thing I'm struggling with is the external conflict. Obviously it's a key thing in a story, so I'd love to hear your ideas!
In my world, writing is a kind of magic and written words can be materialised. It's not that easy though - if you want to create something more… advanced, you need to write all the ingredients as well. That's why creating a human like that is almost impossible - they're just too complicated (someone does manage to do that actually, but that's not what's important right now).
That's what it looks like right now, but I'm not sure how to lead the story from that point. Anyways, I'll be very, very grateful for any kind of help!
oh i like the idea of words being magic themselves! in that regard, i think there would be varying degrees of people who can manipulate words (like a hierarchy - peasants maybe wouldn't be able to, but priests dedicate their lives to learning more powerful words), and from that you can get people who are using the words for more morally ambiguous things. maybe there's an insurgence of people who are turning to darker magic but no one can really figure out who they are because of the words they materialize into being. maybe an important person dies and that's what leads to the creation of a new human, but with some unforeseen complications.
Perhaps school becomes a privilege in case someone writes something bad down???
What about a person has gone beyond that and whatever they speak becomes materialized and those that use the written words are trying to find a way to stop them from taking over…. or doing a Jack the Ripper kind of thing.
Very cool idea!
First, the mystic power of words is a great thing in Judaism and especially in the Kabalah, so you can use them as refferance and inspiration.
Second, maybe there are forbidden words which are banned from practice, so the conflict is about wheter there should or should'nt be banned word at all. Another conflict might be that a powerfull group tries to bann or change languege in order to change the subjects way of thinking (kind of Newspeak in 1984) and to limit their magic powers.
Also, I feel like "EXternal conflict" is more fitting to a conflict between two characters/groups (as oppoused to INternal conflict) and the term you might have meant is something like "main conflict"…(?)
But maybe it's just in theater studies '^'
