When you get to know your creative idea better, you need to preserve the core of it to help you focus. That’s what its spine is for.

One interesting prompt is to see if you can express your idea through a meme. Kind of like this:

Choosing the meme, naming the characters—all of this encourages you to articulate your idea in a very concrete way and gives it a sense of personality. It can be a very powerful part of your creative work’s spine.

Conversely, if you’re not there yet—if you’re struggling to put it into a meme—that’s also a sign. Maybe your idea needs focus. Maybe you need to do more research. (Or maybe you just need to get more familiar with memes and how people use them!)

I wrote more about the process of how things unfolded with the meme here.

I’d also previously written about how putting together a list of 10 similar moments could help you put your spine together.