Most worlds start with a single idea or a single flash of inspiration; perhaps it's some epiphany that sends you into a flurry of creativity. Sometimes it's just a simple thought like, "Wouldn't it be cool if...?"

I call this initial thought the seed of your world. If you've got a seed bouncing around in your head that you can't seem to shake, you probably need to find a place to plant it.

A seed can be absolutely anything. Your seed might seem dumb, or too small, or nothing special, but when you plant it and make it grow, you might find it blossoms into something you never dreamed it could be.

Here are a few of my seeds, some of which I've used to make worlds, some of which are on the backburner for another time. My seeds are sometimes questions, sometimes desires, sometimes strange keywords that came to mind.

- What if I told a story from the point of view of a sword?

- "Goatscape."

- What if aliens met ghosts?

- What if people live handcuffed together? (I came up with two worlds with this one!)

- "Cheerleaders of the Aftermath."

- A dark, disturbing carnival. (The thought led to a 167 page videogame script.)

- I want to make a world based on coffee.

- The Abomination from Warcraft III, but miles tall.

- "Someone Else's Nightmare."

- War of genies.

Some of these seeds you may have thought sounded awesome, some of them you might have thought sounded dumb ("...coffee? Are you serious?"), but each of them could present (or has presented) me with unlimited possibilities. I'm writing an epic poem based on the life of a sword. I wrote half a novel just based on the image of the Abomination being bigger than Godzilla. I have yet to touch a war of genies (take it and run with it if you like!).

But each one of these struck me dumb when I thought of it, and I at least had to jot it down.

My biggest project, and the one I most often share, began with the seed: "I want to make a collectible card game with coded rules." This became FissureVerse, a card game, yes, but the rules are clearly written and the game is intended to be played without confusion. The seed was ultimately nonsense, and has nothing or little to do with the end result, but that doesn't matter; the seed I stuck in the dirt and watered and cared for blossomed into a completely different kind of flower than the packaging told me it would. But that's okay, of course, because Jack didn't know his beans would get him to a land of giants in the clouds when he first planted them, either.

Sometimes, you might have more than one seed. Stephen King, when writing his thousand-page doorstops, uses two seeds, two "What ifs" that he combines together to bounce off each other. After my initial seed for FissureVerse, I've added dozens more seeds to the mix, giving me location names, alien race names, and more.

What's your seed? Have you got one? Have you got more than one? Are you looking for one? Are you having trouble making it grow? Have you seen your seed grow and blossom, and have a story about how it evolved? Is your current world similar or utterly unlike your seed? Do you know where you got your seed, what the spark was that ignited your creativity? Can you help others find seeds for themselves, and show them where to look for seeds (if you even know where you found them yours)?