Peter's Creative Process: treating a seven-year-old

One thing I enjoy doing about once a week is taking an old friend and his young son out. For me, this is a process that is more successful with a bit of creativity.

My brainstorming involves getting ideas on where we might go and what we could do. Food is always an important part of the treat, but should it be seafood, Italian, Japanese, or maybe McDonalds. And what else should we do? My brainstorming here can include ideas such as: visit a bookstore, watch a movie, have some ice-cream (I don't count this as a meal), and so on.

Next, I organize my possible activities: What is the main event or place we will visit? For example, the main event could be an outing to Paragon. Then I organize the other activities in an outline under this main one. At Paragon, we could meet at 10:30 in the morning, and first have an early lunch. The Laem Charoen seafood restaurant is one of my favourites. After lunch, we might visit the B2S shop to check out new films that have arrived since our last visit, and perhaps then pop over to browse in the toy department for a bit. This doesn't excite me very much, but Ea is usually keen to include this on our schedule.

Drafting means sending an SMS to invite Ea and his father to come along, and calling to briefly outline the main parts of the plan.

But of course, it's all up for review. If Ea prefers pizza to seafood on the day, we make a quick revision to the plan and visit Scoozi. Other revisions made after review might be to skip the toy department in favour of visiting Kinokuniya bookstore, or just to add this in addition to the toy department.

Finally, publication is when we meet at Paragon on Saturday morning and set for a few hours of enjoyment, perhaps making last minute revisions along the way.