Creative Agency
October 8, 2025
3-Item Status
Current Location: Milwaukee, WI
Reading: The Eye of the Bedlam Bride by Matt Dinniman
Listening: Anti-Superstar by Haute & Freddy
If you have a moment, reply with your own 3-Item Status.
Quick Notes
New Work:
This week’s Let’s Know Things is about Gamewashing
Yesterday’s Brain Lenses essay was on Vision Splitting & the pod was about the Understanding Gap
Last Sunday’s Writing & Such was on Self-Promotion
Creative Agency
When I was a child, I would often envision an incredibly rich, detailed image (usually something related to monsters or robots or superheroes), but I would be incapable of translating that envisioning to graphite and paper.
That inability to draw things the way I thought they should look was frustrating, and it motivated me to redouble my burgeoning doodling efforts, to take all sorts of advanced placement art classes, and to eventually major in art with a focus on drawing (before eventually pivoting to design and illustration).
I think of this ability—the capacity to dream something up and to then accurately translate that dream into an output other people can (and will want to) engage with—as creative agency. It’s a capacity that some people are born with, but which all of us initially lack with most mediums, be it drawing, dancing, writing, or performance art.
What’s interesting about this concept is that the more creatively agentic we become with a given medium, the more expansive our imaginations become. As I practiced and learned and eventually became the “kid who draws good” at school, my imaginative ambitions expanded along with my capacity to make things. I wasn’t just drawing better ninjas, I was coming up with other, more complex things to draw.
The same tends to be true of any creative practice we might attempt. And by expanding the depth of our creative agencies and the range of agencies we can claim (different mediums and mechanisms), we slowly but surely become more capable of communicating and translating to more and a wider variety of people, even as the things we communicate and translate grow in scope and ambition.
If you enjoyed this essay, consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber, buying me a coffee, or grabbing one of my books.
Interesting Links
If you want more links to interesting things, consider subscribing to Aspiring Generalist.
What Else
We’re finally getting some legitimately Autumnal weather here in Milwaukee, after what felt like an endless summer of too-hot, too-humid condition. I just went for my first run in these new conditions, and loved the hell out of the delightfully chilly, post-rain morning.
I’m about 12,000 words into my new book project, and aiming to add at least another couple thousand a day for the rest of the month (at which point, since the target is 75-80k), I’ll hopefully have my very rough first draft finished up and ready for revision.
Say Hello
New here? Hit reply and tell me something about yourself!
You can also fill me in on something interesting you’re working on or something random you’re learning about.
I respond to every message I receive and would love to hear from you :)
Prefer stamps and paper? Send a letter, postcard, or some other physical communication to: Colin Wright, PO Box 11442, Milwaukee, WI 53211, USA
Or hit me up via other methods: Instagram, Threads, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or @-sign history.