Creative Process

What I learned about the creative process...

I knew I wanted to do something fictional early on. I've never written a story before, save for some high school english assignments. It's always something I've wanted to try! Through my Capstone curation class, I learned about the strategy of "Diversifying Experiences" (Module 5: Project Management Challenge: Harness Your Creativity) to foster new ways of finding creative/design solutions. While mapping out the plot, I exposed myself to a variety of sci-fi/fantasy movies, shows, and short stories, including The Twilight Zone, Black Mirror, and films like My Neighbor Totoro and Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. These media exposed me to many different forms of storytelling, and little snippets from all of them (and many more!) came together to form the final story. A strategy that extends beyond writing the story itself is that of "Killing your darlings", or eliminating superfluous elements that don't reinforce the goal of the project (Module 5: Project Management Challenge: Iteration) . I originally planned for more visual elements to accompany the story, but these didn't have much of a purpose, so I opted to design a front and back cover instead.  To do so, I used prior expertise with Photoshop and Illustrator to achieve this. To format the story itself, I used Adobe InDesign, which I was less experienced in. Finally, printing was a bit tricky, but I ended up using Barnes and Noble Press, a fairly quick and affordable option. All I needed was a PDF of the story, front and back cover designs, and that was it!