KangaRube here: I think reading "House Of Asterion" when we were teenagers many years ago broke something in the brains of Minoanon and I forever (and also I think Nanoff, who is Argentinian like Borges). So we have been stuck with that percolating in us for a long time.
Then there was the novel-in-verse by Canadian poet Anne Carson "Autobiography Of Red", which I pointed Minoanon to at some point. To my memory, this was either one of the things that dominoed into the starting of Minotaur Hotel, or it might have been suggested after he wrote the preliminary 4chan quest. He had been trying to write a kind of semi-mythic story for a long while before a bunch of things just sort of came together into Minotaur Hotel. So I guess to answer the actual question: It is sort of both.
But we are all avid readers, and draw a lot from our influences. The game is built on a great many quotations, paraphrases, and references, that come from an extremely wide range of poetry and novels and philosophy and music (but have a concentration on Ancient Greece and the Ancient Mediterranean as a whole).
Also, sometimes we do have a character arc or bit of a plot in mind, but want to tie it together with an appropriate poetic conceit--- those are times when the study comes posterior to the story, rather than the story springing up from the study.