(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr. Find out more at my newsletter.)
We’re talking how to solve your creative challenges with a Brainstorm book!
Now that you have a Brainstorm Book and are filling it with ideas, you need to review it. When you review it, you’ll go through the contents, go over your ideas, and figure what to do with them. That means coming up with a review schedule – but also coming up with a way to organize these ideas.
Your Review Schedule
First, set up a time to review your Brainstorm Book. You want to find a schedule that’s going to work best for you and not drive you up a wall. I recommend one of the following two choices:
- Do it every 2 weeks regularly.
- Do it twice a month on regular times that makes things roughly equal distance. (I recommend the 5th and the 20th).
Now it’s OK to, now and then move the time around a bit, but don’t get too radical. Good, solid, regular review should become a habit so you make the time to do it.
But what do you do? Well, when you review you need to set a few things up in your notes. Let’s get ready for a review.
Preparing for a Brainstorm Book Review
Remember, set this up before your review begins.
When you review a Brainstorm Book, you’ll sort ideas into four separate files. Now that may sound like a lot, but bear with me.
Here’s the four ways I keep ideas.
- Archives – A collection of files that are things written down that you might refer to one day. One file can be enough, though you may want to divide them into general lists (stories, cooking, etc.)
- The Incubator – This is my list of things you want to do some day, but aren’t sure when. Keep them in a list in order of importance – and no item can be of equal importance to another.
- Backlog – Things you are definitely going to do. These should also be listed in order of priority. In many cases you’ll start breaking down work here because you know it well enough.
- Current Backlog – What you’re committed too now. As an example I plan my work in monthly increments, so it’s a month of things to do.
Yeah, it sounds like a lot, but I keep the Incubator, Backlog, and Monthly backlog in the same spreadsheet.
If you’re familiar with Agile methods, specifically Scrum, some of this may look familiar – that’s because it comes from a mix of my own experience, Scrum, and the Getting Things Done method of David Allen. I sum this up more in the next chapter but to give you an idea:
I use my personal version of Scrum, where I plan work monthly. Every month I determine what I can do (from my regular tasks and Backlog) and then commit to that. Then at the end of the month I re-evaluate.
(You can also get a detailed guide here)
Now you know what you have toset up, let’s talk about how we use the review.
Reviewing Your Brainstorm Book
When you sit down to to a Brainstorm Book review, commit to taking one hour to do it. You may not use all of the time – but sometimes you will. You may also find yourself needing to go over, which is fine, but if it’s a habit you may want to get more efficient.
With that time set aside, do the following:
First you take your Brainstorm book, and go to the latest page that needs revieweed (I mark pages as I review them). You look at the idea or ideas there and decide what to do with each:
- Ignore It – The idea may not be worth it or isn’t as great in retrospect or you weren’t sure what you wrote down.
- Archive It – It may be something you want to write down but there’s no place for it. Put it in an Archive file.
- Incubate It – If it’s an idea that you really see value in, really want to do, then put it in the Incubator. However the Incubator is ranked in order of priority as noted – so you have to put the idea at the right priority. You might reshuffle the entire list (this is why you may need an hour)
- Backlog It – If an idea is really important, really must-do, put it in your Backlog – and again, put it in order of priority. If the idea is maturing, take some time to flesh it out more – you may break it into parts – another reason you may need that hour.
- Current Backlog – If an idea is that important, that necessary (or that awesome) put it in your current backlog so you get to it soon.
- Do it now – If it’s going to take a few minutes, why not just get it over with?
Simple, isn’t it? You look at ideas and determine how important they are, then put them in the proper areas. It’s intended to be simple because we don’t want to overcomplicate this. Next chapter, we’ll talk how to use these gatherings of ideas in more detail.
Why The Review Matters
Now that you’ve started to do your reviews, why are they helpful? Well, first after a review or two you’ll see why they matter, but heres a quick summary:
- You don’t loose ideas or worry about losing ideas. You record them twice over to make sure you have them.
- By seeing your inspiration you’ll be able to trust it to help you. Even if there are problems in being inspired, you now can see them, address them – and know when they’ve worked.
- Analyzing your inspiration helps you understand how you think. You may find ideas repeat, or that certain days are better than others.
- You can get re-inspired. When you look at your ideas, they don’t just come back to you, new ideas form. This further helps you understand how you think and have confidence in your imagination.
- Reviewing them like this is the start of deciding what to focus on. By sorting items into different lists (or discarding them) you start prioritizing already.
This prioritization helps you get ready for long-term planning to bring your ideas to life. In fact, that’s the next chapter.
– Steve
(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr. Find out more at my newsletter.)
Hello everyone, and welcome to my new column series. It’s a followup to an old series I did on how to use a brainstorm book. I’ve decided I need to rewrite to include my later insights, improve the writing, and explore it further. If all goes well I might turn it into a book.
But let’s get to what’s important – the Challenges of Creativity. These are why you need some method anyway.
Creative Challenges That Plague Us
Creativity is something we all rely on. For some of us, such as writers and graphic artists, it may be the core part of our careers. For others, it may be part of what we do, like creating presentations or infographics. Even if creative work isn’t part of our career it may well be part of our hobbies, recreations, and goals.
To be creative, as so many of us need to be, we need inspirations. We need those lighting-bolt ideas that come out of the blue, or slowly—incubated dreams that suddenly come to life. Inspiration is where the connections come together so we can make new things.
The problem is that creativity brings in a lot of challenges – a lot to fear.
We fear a lack of inspiration. We are terrified that our new ideas and innovations will just dry up. Without those creative sparks, we can’t do what we want to do – and the fear of losing them makes it worst.
We might fear too much innovation. Ideas come thick and fast, new possibilities intrude on our thoughts as we’re dealing with past inspirations. We get overloaded trying to keep up with what we might do – it almost makes a lack of inspiration welcome.
We fear losing ideas. No matter how many we have, too many or too few, we need to keep track of them to cultivate them and develop them. How we track them and evaluate them becomes critical to our creative work.
We fear not knowing how to focus. We have our dreams and ideas, we want to develop them – but which do we focus on? What creative work comes next?
We fear not knowing how to plan long term. It’s a problem to focus short term, but how do we arrange all these ideas for long-term? Will some never come to fruition? Should others be moved up in priority?
We fear being blocked. What do we do next? Why did this great idea suddenly stop energizing us? Perhaps the greatest fear creative people have is when things just stop in our heads.
If you sit back and think about it, creative work can be very stressful. Thinking over what can go wrong can paralyze us and make our creative efforts even harder to do. There’s an irony in that.
. . . maybe I shouldn’t have brought it up.
However, even if I’ve suddenly destroyed your confidence, I do have a solution I’ll be discussing in the upcoming blog posts – what I call a Brainstorm Book method.
The Brainstorm Book – A Quick Overview
The Brainstorm Book Method is actually three things.
- First, it’s a physical thing – a book you record ideas in. You use this book to capture ideas.
- Second, it’s a system – a way to use those ideas to maximize your creativity and prioritize them. You review the book at certain intervals, capturing and prioritizing ideas regularly.
- Third, it’s a philosophy – a way to think about creativity. This helps you innovate and make your own methods or tweak my methods to fit you.
I’ll be exploring this method over the weeks to come – to help you out with your creative work and maybe put some of those fears to rest.
Remember, this is not just for artists or writers. This is for anyone that needs to imagine, dream, and creative – which is really anyone. From home cooks innovating new recipies to someone trying to figure out better memo systems on the job, we all create.
So, next column, let’s talk about your Brainstorm Book. Er, the physical one.
– Steve
(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr. Find out more at my newsletter.)
As I edit A Bridge To The Quiet Planet to get it ready for my awesome professional editor, I reflected on what I went through to write the book. I see now this could have been faster if I hadn’t spent time editing as I went, chapter by chapter until the halfway point. In short, I actually aimed for quality too early.
At first this violated my expectations. Being into Agile, I figured that doing it piece by piece, making chapters available to prereaders, would result in better quality. It’s something I’ve read about authors doing before, and I’d read several articles on how instructional writing (which I’ve done for awhile) can be released in modules. Shouldn’t a story be something you can release chapter by chapter and get good feedback?
Not entirely.
Now I’m not saying it’s a bad idea to make fiction available to prereaders in parts, but I’ve come to the conclusion that’s of very limited value. Here’s why.
Instructional and nonfiction works are often something we can break down – and indeed, should break down – into pieces that almost anyone could edit. Yes, some may miss context or seem borderline useless on their own, but nonfiction is often very modular. We process instructions, history, documentation, etc. in discreet chunks – we think step-by-step.
Nonfiction works are a lot like modular software or dishes where you can sample individual ingredients and get an idea of their combined taste.
But fictional works? They’re different.
Fictional works are much more of a whole. They’re intellectual and emotional and literary, requiring many modes of thought and feeling to appreciate them. They often have mysteries and callbacks and references – indeed, deception is part of some some fiction writing. Fiction is hard to evaluate apart from the whole of the work – to truly “get” it you need the whole experience a complete work. Finally, as fiction involves imagination, you often discover your work as you write it.
Fictional works are like software that requires a lot of code to be done before it functions or a crude alpha before it can be evaluated. They’re like a dish that you can’t appreciate until it’s done, or ones requiring careful tweaking to get “just right.”
I now realize that I could be delivering A Bridge To The Quiet Planet to you quicker if I’d decided, as opposed to editing chapter by chapter, I’d just run on and pushed myself to finish the thing and accepted it wasn’t perfect – maybe put out one or two chapters to get my groove. Now that I have a complete work, all the edits are far more richer, far more revealing, far more coherent – and much of my best edits were made when it was done and I could see the whole thing.
When I write fiction in the future, I think I need to accept that my initial effort is basically going to be like a piece of alpha software. Good planning and thought can make it a very good alpha, but my focus should be to get it done so I have enough to work from. Many things in fiction writing only become apparent once you have the whole picture.
Again, I don’t think this means you can’t put unfinished fiction up for review. I just think people need to accept the limits of such things – and ask what delivers the most value for them and the audience.
I also find this very satisfying to think of. I can accept that fiction starts imperfect because of all its factors and charge ahead, admitting it won’t be perfect. It’s just that when the imperfect version is done, the perfect version follows more easily.
(By the way that title took me forever to come up with so I hope you appreciate the attention to alliteration.)
– Steve
(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr)
Hello everyone and welcome to my next blog series. I’m going to be putting this in a few different places because it applies to so many of you – creativity and productivity.
Most of us are in a creative profession – even if we don’t know it. The problem is that creative professions require productivity, yet are also the hardest to manage because creativity has many unpredictables. Being able to be creative, deal with unpredictability, and be organized is a challenge, one rarely met effectively.
I meet this challenge by using Agile methods (Scrum in my case), which you can apply to many efforts, including creative ones. Agile methods are about adaptability, adjustment, responding to change, and efficiency. Perfect for something creative, as long as you make the effort to apply them.
I’m not going to talk which Agile methods to use. You can try Scrum, Kanban, or whatever works for you. Instead, I’m going to talk about the mindset you need to be Agile and creative. I’ll do this by exploring the Agile Manifesto and what it means for creative works like writing, drawing, and more. Agile is all about adjustment and adaptability, something creatives are supposed to be good at – but we’re often restrained by everything from bad organization to our own assumptions.
I’m going to start with the Agile Manifesto – which happens to be about software. This isn’t a problem – this means its perfect. Software is a creative act, bordering on a mixture of high technology and shamanic vision, resulting in hard product through a near-occult process. The Manifesto is a perfect place to start to develop a creative approach.
Now before we begin, let’s take a mercifully quick look at Agile.
A Mercifully Quick Look At Agile
- Agile methods are highly adaptable forms of productivity.
- Agile methods avoid large-scale plans – that often go awry – and focus on adaptability, review, and improvement. I sometimes call this “micro-planning”
- Agile methods have existed for decades, and seem to have originated in store stocking and manufacturing.
- They became more codified in the 90’s.
- The Agile Manifesto and the 12 Agile Principles of 2001 expressed Agile as a Philosophy.
- Thanks to the Agile Manifesto, Agile took off as it could be seen as a mindset.
- I really, really like the Agile Manifesto and find its a good guide to adaptable productivity.
Now, onward.
The Agile Manifesto In Review
Let’s take a look at the good o’l Agile Manifesto.
We are uncovering better ways of developing
software by doing it and helping others do it.
Through this work we have come to value:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.
Here’s the core of good Agile. Work with people over a bunch of tools and methods and meetings. Deliver stuff that works over detailed breakdowns. Work with people directly as opposed to arcane agreements. Respond to change instead of following a plan that doesn’t work five minutes after you finish making it.
It’s a lot of common sense, and like common sense it took someone to write it down to make it clear It’s good advice anywhere, though it’s pitched for software, as are many books and guides on Agile and Agile methods.
So let’s take a look at the manifesto and think about what it means for creative work.
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
You’ve got to create something. You need to understand what people want. The people asking you do to this need to understand what they want. You also need to work with them to communicate, have meetings, reviews, use certain pieces of software (or get people to use them). Sometimes this conflicts as people use different processes or argue one tool over another.
What do you do? You focus on working with people directly as possible. You may have meetings and statuses and use specific software, but that’s not as important as making sure you’re actually working with people directly.
For creative people this is exceptionally important because creative work is a highly individual experience. A person has a vision they need expressed – and you must understand it. There are near-infinite options in creative works, from a color scheme to a dialogue choice, and working with a client or an actor or an artist requires dialogue to “get it right” A creative work can become anything – so talking to the people involved helps it become a right thing.
Because creative efforts involve so many options, you’ll need to focus on interactions with people over formality or a given choice of tool. Sure a regular meeting schedule is nice, but you may need to make that early-morning change. You may use one graphics program while someone else use another – so you need to find a universal file format. These things may matter, but not as much as interacting with people.
Sure you may need to use specific methods and tools. You’ll figure those out. But the first thing is talking to people.
As an Agile Creative:
- Work with people as directly as possible.
- Interact with them regularly.
- Processes, plans, methods, are secondary to the goal of interacting with people – and should support interaction.
- Tools, software, and so on are secondary to the goal of working with people – and should support this collaboration.
EXAMPLE: You’re writing a short story for a specific online magazine – and two people have to give you feedback on it. You figure the best way to do that is to put it on a public document share (that you do use), and chat with them on a web chat (which you’ve never used but they use). Everyone has the chat program on their phones so you can get feedback as you work any time.
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Let’s step away from the word “software” and think of “usable results” here. Creating something usable is your goal because that work – even a rough draft – stands on its own. That’s a lot more valuable than a detailed description or ten pages of noes explaining what you did.
(Note sometimes your product is documentation. In this case it’s not needing documentation of documentation.)
Sure you may need documentation, but you want to get to a result because it speaks for itself. A rough draft gets you feedback. A wearable if safety-pin laden costume can be tried on. Getting something done matters, even if you know it’s a draft or will need feedback to improve.
What’s less valuable is trying to document all of this. Sure, you might need to do some documentation, but don’t make it the most important thing. Do you need a giant list of possible color swatches? Do you need twenty pages of outlines explaining five pages of story? Do you need a Powerpoint to explain another Powerpoint? Do you need all this extraneous stuff?
Probably not. You need enough to do your job so you can make something. Produce something that speaks for itself so you can get your hands dirty, learn, and get feedback. Besides people relate better to something solid.
In fact, with creative works, which often have infinite potential, comprehensive documentation is a trap. You can never be complete. You don’t have time to document fifty ways to do a training video when you need one.
There is value in documentation, of course, but ask yourself this – what’s the value? If you spend an hour writing up a proposal that saves you fifteen minutes, but if you don’t write it you spend thirty minutes experimenting to get it right, did you save time?
As an Agile Creative:
- Focus on delivering the product.
- The product is where feedback comes from, so a flawed product is better than comprehensive documentation.
- Documentation has it’s place, but the product is first.
- There are many substitutes for documentation that are more efficient and effective, such as direct interaction.
EXAMPLE: You’re designing a logo for someone. This involves an incredible range of colors, options, trademark issues, and more. To make it easier you keep multiple versions of the logo and send out a new copy every day to the person that wants it – with their tweaks.
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
You have to work with people to create something – we’ve covered that earlier. But we also have to come to agreements about how we do things, what we’re doing, and so on. Sometimes you just want to stop spelling out the minutiae and talk to someone directly.
That’s what you should do. Collaborate with people, focusing on working together. Arguing fine details, negotiating tiny elements for hours, gets in the way of working directly with people and getting results. It’s also far less adversarial.
This may require you to do a lot of psychology. Or have someone help you with it. But it’s a better approach than spending all your time in negotiations – which, like comprehensive documentation, can be overdone.
Additionally, you’ll want to work out ways to collaborate. Meetings, chat programs, feedback, working together. Make collaboration possible so it can happen – and the more you do it, the less you’ll need to argue fine points that aren’t meaninfgul.
(By the way if someone you work with is all about the contract and not about collaborating, that’s a warning sign.)
As an Agile Creative:
- Focus on collaboration early on.
- Develop methods for collaborating.
- Help the people you do creative work for take a collaborative mindset.
- Work to eliminate negative and pathological contract negotiations – while focusing on the important parts.
EXAMPLE: You’re doing a cosplay commission with someone who has very specific needs, wants, and deadlines. You chat with them regularly and give them updates on likely completion times, and ask questions to help them make decisions. This lets you get to work up front.
Responding to change over following a plan
Every plan you have is wrong the moment you finish it. It may be incomplete. It will be interrupted. The only way for a plan to be right is to not spell it out completely.
Now plans are great – I’m a PMP, I’ve been certified in planning. But reality gets in the way, so you need to focus on being adaptable over following a plan even when it’s gone stale. This is one reason Agile methods are so helpful, they focus on adaptability, with just enough planning to keep moving.
This may sound weird to warn people about change in creative activities. We’d like to think they’re wonderful and spontaneous. This is wrong because creativity, being so hard to pin down, is often crammed into a box of organization and plans to get control of this wild process.
It usually fails.
Ever gotten livid over a requested edit? Wanted to argue with someone about how they critiqued your art? Gotten frustrated at a rewrite of a single paragraph? You know what I’m talking about; because creatives need some control, they often chafe against giving it up. You need to learn to give up that control and leverage change.
I find there’s a few lessons to help:
First, realize change is a tool – often change happens due to feedback, discoveries, and more. It’s up to you to use what happens to learn and to adapt and make your work better. This can be painful, which leads to . .
Secondly, you have to build change into how you do things; make yourself more change-responsive. Don’t put into ink what can be done in pencil. Save versions of your work. Test out what you’re creating earlier than usual.
Third, learn the right level of planning. This may differ from project to project, increment to increment. Find what lets you plan but not overplan. Plan enough get something out but not so much you can’t change.
Fourth, learn how to get feedback. This helps you change well, change effectively, and perhaps change earliy enough you don’t have to ditch a lot of work and ideas.
As an Agile Creative:
- Learn to accept change is inevitable.
- Develop a “Navigating” mindset.
- Find ways to leverage change to make your work better.
- Work in way that let you respond quickly to change.
- Plan the right amount – not so little you’re lost, or so much you can’t shift gears.
- Develop ways to get feedback.
EXAMPLE: You’re working on an indie game, a challenging market to be sure. You break down work by major features and priorities, creating vertical slices of “game” that can be quickly played by beta testers. This lets you get quick feedback while refining code.
The Agile Manifesto For Agile Creatives
So we’ve just been through the Agile Manifesto for creatives. Let’s sum up.
- Focus on interacting with people and getting feedback.
- Deliver things to get that feedback.
- Take a collaborative approach.
- Respond to change – and make sure you can respond to change.
There you have it – a pretty good mindset to adapt so you can be productive. Again you may want to find a method that helps you, but if you keep these ideas in mind it’ll help you find a method AND make it work.
Now, next up there’s also 12 agile principles. Yeah, I know it’s a lot, but we’ll explore them bit by bit – for creatives.
A Side Notes On Sides
The manifesto notes that it value the things on the left (individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration, responding to change) over things on the right (like having a plan). This doesn’t mean that things on the right are bad, its jut things on the left are more valuable.
there’s a paradox here – we do need tools and processes, documentation and plans. But they can get in the way of the things on the right. How do we solve that?
My solution is that things on the right should be used in such a way that they reinforce the things on the left. Use planning tools and methods that support change. use tools that support collaboration. By having these things that can get out of hand become methods of support, you do better and don’t get distracted.
– Steve
(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, www.SeventhSanctum.com, and Steve’s Tumblr)
Some thoughts for all the people out there that follow me for career and creative advice . . .
Improving our skills and abilities, learning new things, is something we all develop. Most of us do it consciously, sometimes with a great deal of planning. It may even obsess some of us as our jobs and lives require us to learn at a rapid pace. However there’s a shadow side to what we choose to become competent in – a choice to learn something means there’s a lot else we choose not to learn at that time.
Every choice to educate ourselves means we’re spending time and resources that aren’t used learn a different subject. Each competency is paid for in not learning something else. For all you are good at, there’s a large amount of things you don’t know and can’t do, and you chose these “incompetencies” willingly or not.
We probably don’t look at learning as “choosing an incompetency” as a form of defense because there’ so much we don’t know and it scares us. We’re taught to think only of being good (or acceptable) at something, not bad at something. We’re taught not to admit failure or lack of ability because we seem weak, but to ignore it or pretend we’re good at everything.
But we have to accept the truth – choosing a competency is also choosing incompetencies. If we accept the we choose our ignorance and lack of ability, we can choose wisely. If we’ve decided we can’t truly know or learn something, then we’re prepared for that gap in our lives.
We can develop that valuable competency of knowing what we don’t know – and why we don’t know it.
We can bring an innocent attitude to learning so those that know something we do not (that we may choose not to educate ourselves on) can teach us.
We can stop worrying about not knowing. We’re all fools at one point, so let’s be fools consciously.
Exercise: List ten things you know nothing about that affect your life. Why didn’t you learn them? What did you learn in their place?
– Steve
