1. Writing

Writing is a low-cost creative exercise that can be very fulfilling.

While videos can be stimulating and exciting, words can prompt us to go on imaginary journeys beyond what we can see. The ideas presented in words can take an enduring hold of our consciousness that visuals can only hope to imitate. Words can change beliefs! Even if we write for ourselves, the process can help to make our beliefs more concrete so that we can explain them better, or even see where we have gaps in our own understanding.

Like a movie or documentary, which relies primarily upon a visual paradigm to espouse its narrative, in the written word, the narrative has to be threaded into the words. Even the visual mediums have a hard time maintaining a strong narrative without words to guide how we think about what we are seeing. It is the narrative spun in the words that enables a writer to take their readers on an inner journey that even huge amounts of money have difficulty pulling off in a movie, where the visuals can even be an impediment to making that inner journey.

The beauty of words are they are not expensive to make, and can take a short amount of time to manifest. To progress from an idea to a polished article may only take a couple of hours, whereas the same production standard in a video can take hours of planning, scripting, recording, and editing across several people to get the same level of quality. Videos are very mechanics-heavy compared to writing, and it is the substantive mechanical skills of video with the accompanying equipment that are required to turn a written script into a working quality reality.

Writing is easily an effective solo effort, whereas a lot of skills are required for video, usually requiring coordination among several people. This means that writing can be a cost-effective means of creativity, especially if not really attuned to expressing visually as painters and like artists have to be. Writing does not require much in the way of equipment and facilities. A modest computer will do and low-cost site hosting is all that is required for having a writing-based website free of advertising and distracting feeds, providing a clean platform for presentation of ideas.

Conversely, producing videos requires video software, which has a significantly increased learning curve compared to word processors or word-based site software, and either using YouTube which makes significant efforts to distract your viewers, or uncluttered video hosting sites like Vimeo that get expensive if posting lots of videos. Forget about hosting videos on one's own site, as the equipment and bandwidth required makes them expensive to connect to the internet.

Even if wanting to get into videos, whose effectiveness largely still spins on the quality of the scripting narrative, spending time perfecting the ability of the written narrative to be an effective communication medium can make the transition to video easier because finding the images to fit a narrative can be easier if having a strong skill in creating inner visualisations.

Overall, writing provides a simple but powerful paradigm that is easy and cheap to get started in, and which can provide a solid creative foundation upon which to build other forms of expression, or just be completely fulfilled doing for its own sake, even if not reaching a wide audience.