When staring down a blank page, where do you begin?
Creative, Ze Frank, thinks about 3 things:
Specificity, scale and surprise.
SPECIFICITY
Specificity of observation and experience.
What do you see? What do you feel?
Describe it in as much detail as you can.
"The average person looks without seeing, hears without listening, touches without feeling, breathes in, without awareness of aroma or fragrance, eats without tasting and talks without thinking."
—Leonardo da Vinci
Think about all the things that are obvious about a situation.
Write them down and then throw them away.
You want to discard the obvious and cliche.1
You’re looking for the novel, unique, fresh perspective.
“Cliche is anything that has become commonplace by overuse. And it is the enemy of good art. The consistent use of cliche tells people that you either do not know enough (or maybe do not care enough) about your topic to communicate with more imaginative and energetic language.”
- Justin McRoberts, Title Pending
SCALE
Life is lived in the extremes of very big and very small.
Conceptually, as you’re thinking about your idea…what are the very big and very small moments?
Think about the visuals. Would the moment best be captured with an intimate close up? A wide establishing shot? Where do you need to zoom in, or zoom out?
Think about the audio. Does loud and bombastic best serve you? Soft and tender? Other?
What are the big and small moments of it all that you can double-down on?
I’m reminded of Osborn’s Checklist for Transforming Ideas and Bob Eberle’s SCAMPER framework.
What can be Magnified? Bigger, stronger, higher, longer, exaggerated.
What can be Minified? Smaller, weaker, condensed, lowered, shortened, lighter, streamlined, understated.
SURPRISE
Pay attention to the pattern and rhythm of things. Whether it’s the cadence of our delivery, our tone of voice, or the length and structure of our written word.
Identify the rhythms and then break them.
When we swim in the familiar and routine, we become desensitized. C.S. Lewis referred to this as the veil of familiarity.2 Things quickly become conventional, status quo and sterile. We stop listening to patterns after we’ve identified them.
“Our wonder and curiosity atrophy. Our dulled senses no longer encounter objects, but only what we already know about, or expect, from them. The labels have been assigned. Everything has a label.” - Ernest G. Schachtel, Metamorphosis
Surprise is about getting attention by disrupting the status quo.
Identify as many patterns and rhythms as possible in all you’re making and then break them.
“It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.” - Anais Nin, The Novel of the Future
All three of these ideas - specificity, scale and surprise - are about upending the conventional.
We need to find that new angle, new lens, new perspective.
That’s how we strike gold.
How do you get unstuck?
How do you find the unconventional, the novel, the unexpected, the new?
Or, try subverting a cliche. Take a well-known phrase or idea and use it in a way that is unexpected or unconventional. Challenge the typical or expected interpretation of a cliche by using it in a new way, in a different context than usual, or in a way that contradicts the original meaning.
C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature