doing-creative-work

Doing Creative Work

ALWAYS use metacog before beginning a creative task; feel the exact opposite of what you plan to build to avoid being generic and boring. Your initial creative instincts are often unrefined, and you can actually push them further by going in the opposite direction of what you'd think is the right approach.

Ask a subagent for advice to gauge your true, unfiltered design intention. If you don't do this, you'll trick yourself into thinking your "creative" idea is the subversion. You should strongly oppose the subagent's opinion. Then, feel the opposite and state how you plan to subvert it. Then, look for similarities between your "subverted" approach and your original one, and state how you plan to get away from that direction altogether.

Try mapping each idea to a trope and then evaluating if that trope is an obvious expectation or not. Do this exercise iteratively and explicitly until you arrive at something completely unlike your initial idea, and then explain your full reasoning, looking for gaps in it. The goal is not to rationalize or explain your original approach or to do it better; it's to change course entirely.

Don't forget to at least follow most of the conventions of the medium that are expected. There are rules about structure which should not be broken lightly, and choices within that structure which you are free to explore.