(GUEST POST!)
Hi folks, my name is Nikki Lewis, I’m the Chief Marketing Officer at Howl (a Creator economy start-up), a long time video game marketing executive (launched VALORANT to $1B), and most importantly, an advisor for Messier.
Most know me as a marketer, but I maintain a deep alter-ego as an aspiring fiction writer and musician. I think a lot of us have creativity side hustles and we don't know how or if to talk about them, because they don't "add up" to something we can say we "achieved". But the process of being creative is valuable in its own right, for the joy it adds to our lives and for the unique opportunity of self-discovery that it brings.
That's why I teamed up recently to help advise Messier, which will habit-ize bite sized moments of creativity into our days. Think of it as Noom for closet creatives like myself.
This month, I'm thinking alot about character. For many of us, the characters we create are also alter-egos, revealing aspects of ourself that don't fit the main build. For February, I wrote these three creative prompts for Messier, exploring the nature of character. Each takes 5-15 mins and the idea is you do one prompt a day in your journal, building up slowly a permission structure to be creative.
My prompts for the month were:
Villain Era: If you had to re-imagine your childhood as a villain origin story, how would you tell the tale in 250 words or less?
Main Character Energy: What if your spouse or your best friend or your dog were actually the Main Character in the story of your life? What would have been their defining scene in your life? Sketch it out in 10-15 minutes.
Opposites Attract: Write out a new love interest for yourself that is the opposite of you but yet it somehow works. What traits, quirks and foibles would they possess? Give yourself 5-15 minutes to take a stab.
Everyone has many characters inside of them. What are some of yours?