Prompts for creativity are a vital tool for amateurs. What can a professional creator use?
Amateurs and aspiring artists have access to many different creative prompts. It might be as fully formed as a Bob Ross painting show, giving you all the details of how to create a painting. It might be a prompt question for an impromptu essay (I did lots of those in high school.) It might be the specifics of a compositional assignment, or the melodic line for a 4-part chorale to write.
All of these prompts help give shape to the creative act. A young creator needs scaffolding to use in their creative acts, because it’s hard to visualize a finished work of art when you haven’t made very many.
Creative professionals have a lot less help – they cannot turn to an assigning teacher or a TV show to guide them, most of the time.
And yet, I think that creative professionals learn to ask the questions that help give the same scaffolding to their artwork. Creators ask questions about the artistic commission (What do they seek? How it will it be used?) – and they ask questions about the audience (Who will consume it? What do they like in art?), and they ask questions about the medium and tools (What tools will I use? What instrumentation, what structure?).
Before you ever begin to create build creative scaffolding by using questions to replicate the creative prompts that would have aided your creativity when you began creating.