Transcript
Speaker: On Chris Deals With It, I talk about the frameworks and methods I use to clear personal, creative, and professional roadblocks. My goal is to help others bridge the gap between where they're at now and what they want to achieve.
Speaker: If you're new to the show, I'm an engineer, writer, parent, game designer, leader, and reader who leverages that experience to develop creative solutions to problems. First, an AI statement, that all elements of this episode are products of the author, Chris Kreuter, and made without the use of any AI tools.
Speaker: Welcome to episode 75 of Chris Deals With It, a creative process, ideation. This is part one of a multi-part series about the creative process. We'll cover my thoughts on how this process applies to creating and publishing works, and how it applies to games, fiction writing, other creative endeavors, and our professional careers.
Speaker: As always, the views expressed in this podcast are mine. What works for me isn't likely to work for you exactly the same way. The usefulness of these various pieces of advice will depend on your project, experience, tools, and more as I'll get into.
Speaker: The goal of this series is to share my frameworks, mindsets, strategies, and experiences that have led me to this point of my creative journey. This is an ever-evolving process as it should be for everyone.
Speaker: My creative process starts with ideation, the capture and development of ideas. I explore their potential and interrogate their suitability. it's important to identify their potential value to audiences before embarking on the process of making the work.
Speaker: That's not to say I'm against spontaneity. The length of time I spend ideating will vary. Inspiration might strike to draw something or write a short story. I won't hesitate to jump in and start since the amount of time investment to produce is low.
Speaker: But I spend far more time on this step if I'm planning my next novel or if I were collaborating on designing a new board game with complex mechanics. And there may be times during latter stages of a project where I will come back to ideation, either to develop aspects of a work or variations or rethink elements that aren't working.
Speaker: There are no rules on where ideas and inspirations can come from. They can arise suddenly, unexpectedly. I literally jumped up Epigo, the first board game we produced. The moment I woke up, I sketched everything I could remember about this game I'd been playing in my dream.
Speaker: Then I whipped up a prototype within two hours. Inspiration can come from playing something, consuming media, observation, all those combined, basically anywhere. Ideas might click together after being mulled over and iterated over a long period of time.
Speaker: Or they can be developed during collaborative brainstorming sessions that are dedicated to creating ideas from defined limits or restrictions. One tip, be ready to strike when the ideas come.
Speaker: Keep a notebook around whenever possible. I find that pen and paper make it a lot harder to self-edit and get distracted. ah You wanna get the ideas down and worry about their viability later. EpiGo evolved significantly from that original idea that I dreamt up, but it wouldn't have happened at all if I didn't seize the moment to write all my notes down.
Speaker: So when you get an idea, what qualifies it as a good one? Good ideas have this tendency to kind of stick around in your head. It rolls around, it gathers momentum like a snowball rolling downhill.
Speaker: Ideas should inspire you, implore you to move towards them. Keep exploring their potential. As you explore the meaning and potential of an idea, ask yourself, why is it inspiring you?
Speaker: Get to the core motivations behind the idea. It's really important to interrogate these ideas, understanding where they might lead. What could it become? Is it a product, a service, an experience, foundation, a whole company?
Speaker: Conceptualize the ways that that finished thing could look, feel, play like. What formats are possible for the work? Who might a target audience be? Where and in what context might they come across your work?
Speaker: Is this something that you would want to buy, use, experience if it existed today? If not, it might be a sign of a project they might lose motivation on. It's also important to ask yourself if you're the right person to develop the idea.
Speaker: I'm a big proponent of writing about what you know. Charlie Jane Anders puts this really well in her great book on writing, Never Say You Can't Survive. Representation without appropriation, where to draw the line, don't center a story on someone else's personal or cultural experiences.
Speaker: I agree with this, but this isn't to say you don't want to have diverse characters in your creative work, just that the core idea should be centered on something essential to who you are and your experiences. After all, our creative works are reflections of who we are.
Speaker: With your idea, what's the overall message or impact you hope it's going to have on society, your field or genre, or on you? And you get to define this. It doesn't have to be some grand goal.
Speaker: And it's really helpful to be clear on this, especially if you're intending your work to serve some kind of social justice, explore an emotional topic, or get across a specific perspective. You know a great example is is is the creation of this series.
Speaker: I maintained a clear vision of my objective throughout to demonstrate through my ideas and experiences that making stuff, whether it be games, books, podcasts, whatever, is going to have incredible impacts on your life that will extend far beyond the works themselves.
Speaker: When gauging the impact of your work, consider the mental and physical states your audience might interact with your work. Compare your interactions with a novel versus an arcade game. Both can have profound underlying messages, or not.
Speaker: Yet they're delivered with vastly different speeds, technologies, and interactive elements. It's craft that gets the message across, not the technology used to deliver it. Keep in mind that the mental and physical states that you're in while producing the work will impact the work.
Speaker: There's a fantastic exploration of this in the amazing novel Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabriel Zevin. Anyone who's a fan of video games and their development and design should totally read this book.
Speaker: There's rarely a clear line between this initial ideation stage and when I move to the second stage of scaffolding, which I'll get into in part two, that's episode 76. This transition may come in fits and starts as I work to qualify my ideas, or it may come really fast as I mentioned at the start of this episode.
Speaker: The key is in pushing yourself to move beyond the world of ideas. Be willing to make something that will inevitably have flaws that may not live up to the grand visions you had at the start. But through the creative process, you may end up with something unexpected.
Speaker: Something that takes you to unplanned places or causes you to interact with unexpected people, gaining unique experiences and skills along the way. To embrace the creative journey fully, you need to make things.
Speaker: We'll end with a quote which is about ideas and it's courtesy of the science fiction legend Ray Bradbury. In the instance of getting an idea, I go act it out on paper. I don't put it away. and don't delay.
Speaker: ah don't put off to tomorrow doing what I must do right now to find out what my secret self needs, wants, desires with all its heart. And then it speaks. And I have enough brains to get out of the way and listen.
Speaker: And with that, have a great day.
Speaker: If you feel that Chris dealt with it, I'd appreciate your support of the show by sharing it with someone who might benefit. Ratings on your favorite podcast player are also helpful in growing the audience. Visit chriscreuter.com for free downloadable PDFs with notes and resources from today's episode.
Speaker: Sign up for the CDWI mailing list or to send in your problems or requests for future shows. That's chriscreuter.com or use the link in the show notes.
