Is your creative personality a destiny to be accepted or a set of skills to integrate?
Is your creative personality a destiny to be accepted or a set of skills to integrate?
"Quad-ing" Ellen Brock's quadrants of Plotter/Pantser + Intuitive/Methodological with Nick Milo's Architect/Gardener methodology to understand my creative "nature" vs "nurture."
I believe that one of the signs that a creative has leveled up is that they have implemented enough advice that they have developed an ability to curate future suggestions they come across.
Embracing self-knowledge makes it much easier to quickly identify advice or suggestions that are worth trying out and what suggestions won’t work (or even might be damaging) for building a confident and skilled personal style.
I realized I had leveled up when I cleaned out my YouTube channel subscriptions to clear out the less-than-helpful writer “gurus” and discovered that there was only one channel left: Ellen Brock.
All of Brock’s videos on self-editing are pure gold. She’s honest, but respectful in her reviews suggestions. She deeply understands all genres, story structure frameworks, and gets down the brass tacks of the real problem when a story isn’t working.
But of all her videos, this is the one that has made the most difference to me since I watched it about two months ago:
According to Brock’s methods, I identified myself as a Methodological Pantser.
This means that I can start writing a story without knowing how it will end. However, I must have “tent poles” or milestones along the way to find my way to whatever end that will eventually reveal itself.
Is your creative personality nature or nurture?
Nick Milo’s “Linking Your Thinking” methodology includes the concept of "Architect” and “Gardener.”
Milo admits that a person will gravitate naturally to being either an Architect or a Gardener in the stage of making creative connections. He encourages a person to identify this “starting point” and use it to inform where their weaknesses are and how they can offset them.
His approach encourages the Gardener to develop the skill to identify when their gardening preference is causing them to become lost in the proverbial weeds and know how to add just enough limits to the process. Likewise the Architect should learn to identify when their reliance on structure is limiting their potential and know how to add more chaos and curiosity.
Milo encourages the individual to develop the skills to flow back and forth between the two “personalities” to take advantage of the best and mitigate the worst of both styles.
In contrast, Brock’s system of breaking the styles into four types is more fixed in that she doesn’t suggest that a person can move between the states.
Brock’s methods assume the creative personality is firmly set in a drafting/editing style that should be embraced and built up to create the best material.
I personally have never heard any creative advice other than Milo’s Architect/Gardener framework that a person can (or should) see themselves as potentially both a Plotter and Pantser and to focus their energy into understanding when and how to engage the opposite of their natural personality.
I love both Brock and Milo’s approaches. As a Gardener and Methodological Pantser, I am attracted to the chaos of paradox and find excitement in determining how two things that initially sound like night and day opposites can actually both be true … and even more, create a “plus” effect on the other.
In an effort to collide the two systems to get at a new understanding of them both, I created the following quadrant:
I believe the next step to understand how these ideas can work to improve my creative process is to integrate another of my favorite quadrant frameworks: The Cognitive Stack, used in the Myers-Briggs personality typing system.