I have this problem where I put all my time and effort into a conlang and Iâm really happy with it, then I leave it for a bit and when I come back to it I see itâs kind of amateurish and I donât like it anymore, so I scrap it and reboot it, and this keeps happening, so now most of my languages are on their fourth or fifth draft. If you've ever felt his way, did you ever overcome it, or do you still have the urge to revise your old conlangs? Am I doomed to never feeling satisfied with my work?
I donât like to redo a conlang unless I have a very good (and clear) idea about what I want to do with it. Itâs fine to just leave a project as is and start a new oneâeven one thatâs either phonologically or morphologically similar. I personally find that approach much cleaner. Itâs easier to just say, âThis is a conlang I created in 2002 and worked on for two years until I realized it wasnât any good. It was a useful exercise, and there were some neat ideas there that I may be able to use later. At present, though, the project is done, in that I donât wish to work with it any longer.â
Personally, if I werenât cutting these things off, it would just exhaust me. Itâd be hard to keep track of what was good about the original draft and what wasnât and what had changed⊠Itâs hard to rip stuff out thatâs integral to the language itself, because it necessitates potentially hundreds of tiny changes throughout the language, and if you miss one, the result is messy. I canât stand that. Itâs better to just start fresh, for me.
I can give you one example of a language I actually did reboot and why. The second ever (I believe?) language project I started was called Gweydr. I heard about palatalization in class, and so I created a language that I thought of as âbackwardsâ palatalization. Specifically, there were these sets of vowels:
Front: i, ÉȘ, y, Ê, e, É, Ăž, Ć, ĂŠ
And I had this idea that there would be certain consonant changes before the front vowelsâspecifically:
k > ks, t >ts, p > ps, g > gw, d > dw, b > bw
This is just silly. But yeah, the name of the language is /gejdr/ and comes out [gÊ·ejdr]. Thatâs how the original version of the language worked.
It wasnât long before I abandoned it, and I just let it sit there. Then some time in graduate school, I had an idea for a way to create some interesting declension classes for a case system. I thought this might be a way to reclaim Gweydr, so I redid the phonology (still plenty of [gw], and the like, but no longer surfacing as a result of different vowels. Instead, there was a full rounding, fronting, and ATR harmony system that didnât affect consonants), and redid the grammar, while still keeping the spirit of the language. That version of the language is documented (to an extent, since I stopped updating the site) here.
Eventually, though, I realized even this revision wasnât that good, and so I left it be. Recently, Iâve started to use it for a D&D campaign Iâm running as the âdefaultâ language (i.e. the languages all the players and most NPCs they encounter speak). It mainly gets used as a way to name things, but in using it, Iâm running up against the issues I had when I abandoned the language a second time. Since Iâm using it actively, Iâm going to give it a third (light) revision, when I get some free time here next month, but Iâm only going to change the elements that Iâm having problems with (going to do a new font, since the one I did for it is irredeemable; going to reorganize the dictionary; going to work on derivational strategies; going to calm down those declension classes, most of which donât need to be specified, etc.).
Each time I went back to this language, though, there was a reason. Like the reason I used it for my D&D campaign was because I like the sound of it for character names: The phonology isnât difficult for English speakers (outside [Ăž] and [y], which I ignore for the campaign), and it produces names that sound name-like to English speakers, but still sound both foreign and âoldâ. If I didnât have a specific reason to use the language I would just build a new one, or choose a different language.
So in your case, you might try leaving some of these projects and starting brand new ones. Theyâll still be there! You can still come back to them! It just might help if you feel deflated having to constantly revise and rework the same material.
Regarding your very last question, though, thatâs entirely personal. Iâve never been satisfied with anything Iâve done for long, but thatâs me. Itâs not something thatâs endemic to conlangingâor art, in general: itâs something that occurs in many conlangers and artists. You can either work to become more positive and focus on the good elements of your projects, or you can work to accept that your work will never be perfect, but can be good enoughâand good enough can feel pretty darn good, if you let it. At the same time, itâs nice to hold onto some of that old perfectionism simply because it can serve as a motivator. That is, you can let the perfectionism serve you, rather than dominate you. It can be quite empowering if youâve been suffering under it for a while. Make that perfectionism your servantâsomething you can let out on purpose every once and a while to help you achieve your goals. Then when you donât need it, put it back in its cage and remember thatâs itâs a pretty cool thing to create a languageâor even a piece of oneâand that it never would have existed were it not for you. Thatâs pretty awesome.
