What Studying 3D Modeling Taught Me About Creative Writing
“I wisely started with a map, and made the story fit.”
If you’ve read the About section of my site, you already know that I hold a BA in Game Art and Development with a minor in Creative Writing. As part of the core coursework for my degree, I learned 3D modeling, sculpting, texturing, and animation. What I didn’t expect was how much studying game development would prepare me for my chosen minor and, eventually, lay the groundwork for pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing.
More specifically, it taught me that creative freedom does not mean creative recklessness.
A work of art can be interpreted in countless ways, but every element within it should still feel connected to a larger theme, emotion, or intended experience. Whether I am designing a creature or writing a character, the question is not simply whether the idea is interesting. The question is whether it belongs.
The Living Cage, final project for SNHU’s GRA-402: Creature Design
Take this model I created for an SNHU course: The Living Cage.
At first glance, most people would probably try to determine what exactly they were looking at. Once they learned that it was designed to inhabit a larger 3D environment, they might begin dissecting its purpose. Where did it come from? What does it do? Who created it, and why?
As the artist, those were precisely the questions I was responsible for answering.
The model was created for GRA-402 Creature Design. We were given a list of predetermined video game concepts to choose from, then asked to produce several pieces of concept art before selecting one to develop into our final model.
The game concept I selected was Pixie Dust:
Pixie Dust is a fast-paced, dystopian single-player adventure game in which the player must enslave pixies and collect treasure.
That concept established the creative boundaries of the assignment, but it left nearly everything else open to my individual interpretation. I had to decide how this dystopian world had formed, how its society was structured, why its pixies were being captured and enslaved, and what conditions allowed such a system to operate in plain sight. From there, I began considering the factions that might benefit from that system and those that might resist it.
Without torturing you with the complete lore I created over one particularly sleep-deprived weekend, I’ll summarize:
Servants of Stoneway City’s human pixie hunters, Living Cages are artificially constructed lifeforms. Each is a golem-like creature designed to follow its master and assist in the capture of pixies and collection of treasure. Its torso consists of a magically reinforced iron cage, allowing hunters to transport captured pixies without risking injury to themselves or escape by their prisoners.
Several of my classmates interpreted the word “dystopian” through a cyberpunk or post-apocalyptic lens, often blending technological and magical elements. I chose a more traditional fantasy approach. We all began with the same concept, yet the worlds we produced were radically different.
The wonderful thing about creative work is that none of those interpretations were wrong. What mattered was whether each design felt native to the world surrounding it.
Nothing within a fictional world exists in isolation. Its architecture, materials, and functions all imply something about the people who created them and the society they inhabit. A successful design should make the viewer feel that the world continues beyond the mountains obscuring the lands outside their view.
Designing characters for a story works in much the same way.
My 3 A.M. Tea Obsession
By the time I entered the creative writing portion of my degree, I already had experience taking a vague concept or stray 3 A.M. thought and building an entire fictional world around it, complete with political systems, social structures, histories, and competing factions.
I recognized that studying 3D art had unexpectedly taught me that the people and creatures occupying those worlds must feel shaped by them.
A character should not appear on the page simply because the writer needs someone to dump exposition, provoke jealousy, or wander aimlessly until dismissed. Something in that character’s off-page life placed them on a journey that eventually brought them before the reader and into the protagonist’s path. Their personal history should be shaped by the world they inhabit, just as that history should influence how they move through their environment and interact with the people around them.
One concept often reiterated by instructors in creative writing programs is that the characters we create had lives before stepping onto the page, and that those lives will continue after they leave it. For me, that advice can be a double-edged sword. My characters often benefit from having deep internal lives, but developing the worlds around them can sometimes consume more of my writing time each week than the actual writing itself.
Studying game development reinforced the exact brand of intentionality I would later need as a writer. Through constant review, peer workshops, and instructor feedback, we examined how well each design aligned with the game’s premise and with the creator’s explanation of its purpose. Over time, that process helped me develop a more disciplined approach to objective critical analysis.
It didn’t matter how impressive a particular model was. If it was made of wood but placed in a game world consisting entirely of volcanoes and ash, you had a problem.
The same principle applies when writing characters for fiction. A well-written and appealing character can still weaken a story if their presence does not support its larger design.
That lesson becomes especially important during revision, when some of the most brutal cuts occur. My personal philosophy is to prevent at least a few of those cuts by writing with intention from the beginning. That does not necessarily save time, but it can save a few emotions. It allows me to recognize when characters have not earned their place in the story before I become too personally invested in keeping them there.
After all, no one wants to see me curled up in bed for a week mourning a fictional character I created.
What interesting lessons have you carried from unexpected places?
