Have I done a blog on this before? Yes. I have. But I’m also still building aliens and discovering new things about it. I’ve also been sharing my progress with friends, and that’s naturally brought up a lot of questions, which has provided a lot of answers, so… yeah. I’ve figured all these tips I’ve given might help someone out there, so why not share them? Some might be old, but they’re good. At least to me. These are only tips from my personal experience and methods- what works for me won’t work for everyone, and that’s good! Expand and explore and create. It’s fun. But onto the notes:
The hardest part about creating aliens is consistency. See what I mean in an obvious example. I created a sit and wait predator at one point, then proceeded to make them incredibly agile- but that doesn’t make sense. Why would a sit and wait predator need agility? It’s evolutionary niche is to sit and wait. So I had to go back and revise that to make it all coherent. I went about removing the agility. This applies to pretty much everything in alien creation. The biggest question to ask yourself with every feature is “Why?”, social, biological, psychological, and everything else.
Don’t be afraid to make your aliens utterly alien in shape. You could make an alien a sphere if you wanted to. Or a two dimensional circle. Honestly the more unearthly you make their biology, the more fun it can get. They’re aliens. I have an alien species that is made of fumes. Different materials work as long as you can convince your reader. Not everything needs to be flesh, or even plant matter!
Pronouns. Do your aliens even have pronouns? Does their language only account for name? Do they only speak in third person? What if their pronouns weren’t even based on self expression, but based on some kind of emotion? Like a language with an “i’m busy” pronoun, and a “I’m happy” pronoun? There’s so many things you can do with language. They can affect the dialects your aliens have when they speak in another language, too, like a common language.
Reproductive cycles. A lot of media marks alien reproduction as something within human perception, like egg laying, live birth, or even parasitic stuff- but they’re aliens. You can go so much further. You can have your aliens be born as microorganisms from the teardrops of their parents and grow as they’re stewed together in a vat. Throw in food and mix until you have baby. You can make them have entirely different forms depending on their life stage. They’re aliens.
What technology they don’t create. There’s a lot to say in what a species does create, but there’s also a lot in what they don’t create. Think of it like this: if a species doesn’t have computers, maybe they just don’t have the tech. But they could also have photographic memory and lightning quick thoughts, or maybe they’re connected by a hivemind. Maybe they don’t need computers. Anything a species doesn’t have speaks easy exposition. A lot of media will use this in a way that’s like… they use what the aliens don’t have to highlight what they aren’t, but to me it’s super fun to use what aliens don’t have to highlight what they are.
Evolution is incredibly important to species building in my mind. It makes it easier to figure out anatomical traits and behaviors, all the while fleshing out the world. Then, when you have traits and behaviors, you get a better idea of what that species’ society looks like. How would hibernation effect a government? Does family structure matter? There’s a lot more I could put to this, but I struggle to word it. How a species acts defines their customs.
