Gardening not Architecture 🥗

Pick a card. Any card.

That’s what you’re supposed to do with Oblique Strategies – the deck of ‘worthwhile dilemmas’ created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt in 1975. Should you feel lost for inspiration during creative activity, the idea is to pick one of the cards at random and do what it says.

Here are three I’ve just plucked from my 2001 edition of the deck.

“Who should be doing this job? How would they do it?”

“Go to an extreme, move back to a more comfortable place.”

“Turn it upside down.”

Coming from the worlds of music and art, it’s clear how Eno and Schmidt were able to deploy the cards. For instance, Eno used them in the recording studio with artists such as David Bowie and Coldplay, while Schmidt used similar sets of aphoristic prompts for much of his painting career.

But they can be used for writing too – particularly playful writing where you have headroom to fly off in unusual directions.Their practical value in the world of writing content for marketing is more limited. I’m not sure I’d have any clients left if I followed instructions such as “Give way to your worst impulse”, “Emphasise the flaws” or “Be dirty”.

But for anyone whose work involves writing, these entertaining distractions are a reminder of the perils of getting stuck in a rut. Sometimes we need a little nudge to help us write something  better. That could be an instruction on a card, or it could be a chat with someone, or simply going for a walk.

Oblique Strategies (available on Eno’s website for £50) is a lovely thing though. And I have a favourite card that seems particularly relevant to the art of great writing in the age of AI-generated, algorithm-driven content.

It simply says: “Gardening, not architecture.”