Your revision timetable is a basic element of your success. Success takes refinement and some hard work. You should be familiar with the concept of question spotting or prediction of what will be tested in the exam. Teachers at my old school were always ones for only letting you know what their predictions were for the exams in the days prior to the exam. This does not give me very much time before the exam to use their predictions to focus my revision.
You have to do the prediction yourself! Get past exam papers and look for the trends. For example, in A-Level History, only a certain number of essays would come up in any given year. The topics appeared from the exam paper to come up, in different variations, once every two to three years. In the exam, you must right 3 essays from a choice of 6, you can predict, with a high degree of certainty what two of the essays will be. Make those two essays your focus early and learn the information you need to know for the exam.
Second prepare your back up topics, which should be the topics you can turn to if your if your predictions are not correct. If you have to write three essays, there are six questions and, say, 12 examinable topics. If you are a well prepared student then you will have prepared eight-nine topics thoroughly.
Let me point out a quirk of some teachers approaches to the vague concepts of ‘creative work’ and ‘lateral thinking’. Firstly, as a GCSE student or A-Level student its highly unlikely, that over the course of your year as a Student that you are going to think up an interesting or new point that no historian has thought of before and which is actually correct. Secondly, examination markers mark exams on the basis of lists of information.
Being creative and writing points in essays which are ‘out of the box’ in exams can backfire. You could be losing marks by not demonstrating that you know the course content. If the point you are making is wrong, then you are demonstrating that you don’t know the information. So be careful when you are being creative.
A final point I should note is that, if you are a truly creative person, its unlucky that you are going to find courses and school terribly interesting given that the whole point of school is to drum information into you and then test to see if you remembered it. I hope that you are finding means through music, writing or any other pursuit as an outlet for your creativity. I want this site to teach you as many methods as possible to use your time in class effectively, spend less time revising and achieve great exam results so that you can pursue the activities that you really want to do. Get A* marks and hang out with your friends is what this site is all about.