Operating with a principled structure is the most important thing, in my experience. You can grind in circles for ages with any topic or medium. The trick is t

Operating with a principled structure is the most important thing, in my experience. You can grind in circles for ages with any topic or medium. The trick is to find a directed approach, which means getting a little more philosophical about it and then following through on that philosophy. Exploring simple themes like those in the ancient myths and legends, metaphysical ideas, moral reasoning, and technical philosophy like "what sorts of marks I can draw that successfully indicate the thing I see." These all come together when you go to make a completely realized, coherent performance or piece of media. Identifying, respecting and following through on the conceptual structure gets you to passable skills of craft in most every field, and it's very available with effort and an existing appreciation of the medium: just start doing deep analysis of existing work. Take notes, write about the key elements using the concepts you know. Try to reproduce those parts you don't understand. Appreciation of the whole is always the first step, because dismissing any part is likely to mislead you. But what you ultimately want to approach through the philosophy is chaotic interaction: "What happens when I put these two things together?" "I don't know." "Well, try it and find out." And then you're doing research - your philosophical framework should be strong enough to come up with a falsifiable hypothesis: "why does this joke work or not work? Because A, B, C." This is approached intuitively at first and gradually codified as you go on. You might come out of it with a singular work, or a formula for a whole set of them. It tends to be the case that career creatives can spend their entire life exploring and iterating on a tiny set of principles, which explains style distinction. Edit: And I should add to this, "what are good examples of this in practice?" Improv acting is one of the best because it derives its energy and reliability from having underlying structure in the form of recurring characters and improv games. If the characters know each other and are familiar with a collection of games(which act as a kind of guard rail for staying coherent, a way to haul things back to creative productivity) they can reconfigure the scene in an instant and seamlessly recover from points where it slows down, and make everything look totally believable while still being surprising. I'm a bit too much of a deep-thinker to keep up in improv, but it's a useful signpost for "how do I get in that zone?"