Kinetic Creativity
I always end up turning creative expression into a "thinking" activity. There's always a focus on precision, on figuring out and saying exactly what you mean.
A piece of art must start with some sort of core idea and composition. A game must have some underlying principles that it follows. A song has to have some sort of structure.
But, this is only one approach to creative expression.
One thing that I want to try is embracing a more "kinetic creativity": creativity that is fueled more by immediate emotional energy rather than thought. I want to focus on being more sporadic, and improvisational, rather than calculated and precise.
I started thinking about this idea after playing the game Webbed. (note: this game has many spiders and bugs)
In Webbed, you play as a spider and a lot of the game is shooting webs and swinging or climbing on them to navigate around the terrain.
The game is targeted towards a more casual audience, so these mechanics are very forgiving: you can rapid fire webs infinitely without worry of cooldowns or ammo.
The allowance of these mechanics means that you can be very flippant and random with throwing webs: you don't need to care about planning your moves.
For me, this encouraged this sort of "kinetic creativity". I threw webs anywhere and everywhere. Navigation was this energetic dance of flying through the air and placing down walkable surfaces to land on just in time, only to launch off of that and do it all over again.
I really enjoyed entering a new, webless, area and absolutely filling it with webs all over the place haphazardly.
Another game that captures this spirit well is Chicory: A Colorful Tale.
The entire game world is a blank coloring book, and it's your job as the wielder of the paintbrush to fill the world with color.
Initially, I started off being very deliberate. I wanted to make sure that everything was the right color and in the lines and consistent. The grass should be green, the sky and water should be blue. Everything had to have some sort of self-consistent logic to it and I really wanted to stick with it.
By the end of the game, I was scribbling in everything based on what I desired in the moment. I would enter a new screen and immediately began filling it with color, often randomly. I started using the stamps to make shapes and symbols across the landscape, and I started adding in new details and doodles that the lines never indicated. Revisits to old areas were opportunities to give the area a new look.
I had broken out of a rigid set of rules that I had made for myself about what the world "should" look like or how I "should" color. It was very fun to make my mark on the world in this very energetic and free way.
Being deliberate and precise in your art is useful: it allows you to dig really deep and refine your ideas to make them the best that they can be. But, there is a joy of creation that can only be had when you embrace the improvisational and energetic.