Creativity Requires Tenacity

Standing in my garden among several hundred onions and garlic, I gazed down at one of the many nemesis I had been facing. The current one was a bit of henbit (or lamium aplexicaule if you prefer) that simply needed to be removed.

Yes, I know, some folks like to eat it. I prefer to think of henbit as a yet another weed that needs to be removed from my vegetables, and fed to the chickens. I'd been at it for a couple of hours wdhen I'd spotted this weed. During that time, I became more and more disturbed by the pervasiveness of the weeds.

This particular piece of henbit was so large, and encroaching on my garlic, that I wondered how I hadn't seen it first.

Then I recalled the first ad I ever wrote.

After I read the creative brief (which I helped write - but that's another story for another time), I began work on the project with headlines.

I first wrote the most obvious and on-the-nose headline I could imagine, "We sell insurance and investment products, and you should buy them from us."

I started with the obvious, because it focused my attention on what the ad needed to convey. It was a conscious effort to reduce the creative brief into something more the length of a haiku. Plus, I knew it could only get better.

Then I started writing more headlines.

And more headlines.

Page after page of headlines on my legal pad. And I had a whiteboard filled with words that struck a nerve with me.

Most of them were awful. Just limp, little, half-formed ideas begging to be tossed in the waste.

So I started weeding. Pulling and cutting and getting rid of the ones that were just taking up space and getting in the way.

After the weeding, I had to plant. So I wrote more headlines.

Another page on the pad filled quickly.

As I wrote, I kept weeding until I had a dozen or so headlines that I thought were worth sharing with my Art Director partner. (Yes boys and girls, back in those days there were still copywriter/art director teams.)

When I showed him what I had, he looked at the one I had written at the top of my pad, and said, "That's brilliant. Why'd you bother writing more?"

The reality was, that I'd written that particular headline as one of the last ones. I just happened to like it so I wrote it at the top of a new page on my pad before showing him. Sure, I'd written a few more after; however, it was hardly the first one I wrote, regardless of how it must have appeared when I handed him a notepad with that headline at the top.

Just like the henbit that perturbed me, the headline we settled on to pitch to the client wasn't the first one. It just became more and more obvious as I weeded a lot of others out of the way.

I didn't stop at one ugly headline, any more than I'd stop after pulling one ugly weed.

I kept working until I'd found something worth writing.

The weeds will always return. There will always be more for me to yank, and feed to the chickens or toss into the compost bin.

And I'll be there, just as I was when trying to write that first ad.

Because I'm far more tenacious than any weed.

Potatoes Growing & Cucumbers Planted

Time And Patience Are Powerful Allies

Each spring when the flowers bloom, the garden reminds me that you cannot rush beauty.

We forget this far too often, especially when it comes to businesses such as advertising. Conversations and thoughts and meetings and articles always seem to be about the newest shiny object, or the next offer, or the promotion to end all promotions.

The work suffers as a result. There's no time to let it grow and mature. There's no space to let it root and develop. Ideas are sown and harvested in matter of hours or days.

I'm as guilty of this as anyone. I've written video scripts in just a couple of hours, and developed second and third versions is half the time (or less).

I get it. Clients sign the checks on the front, Service providers sign them on the back. We have to keep clients happy so we can keep the lights on.

So clients have incredible power to dictate timelines.

Clients have needs. Clients have deadlines. Clients want it fast and good and cheap (so much for the days of only being able to pick two of three). And with crowdsourcing, design outsourcing, and a gig economy that rewards the lowest bidder more often than it rewards craftsmanship, the competition for clients' attentions and budgets is increasingly fierce.

We don't take the opportunity to sort the seeds of ideas by hanging them all over the office wall (ignoring for a moment the fact that office walls themselves are vanishing in favor of the creative-killing idea of open-floor-plan collaborative environments).

We don't let the seeds germinate by taking walks. Going to a movie. Having a beer in the afternoon. Anything but staring at the seeds.

We don't sow them, fertilize them and water them well by adjusting each syllable so the poetry and impact are both maximized; kerning the type so it welcomes the eye; adjusting leading and line spacing to remove unsightly widows and random breaks.

We don't prepare for a bountiful harvest by diversifying, preferring specialized monocultures (POP, email, content management, apps, social media) instead of holistic, integrated campaigns.

And that creates lifeless, listless, less-than-memorable creative work that is as commoditized as the majority of products they sell. The moments when I see a piece of creative work and think, "Damn. I wish I'd done that." are fewer and farther between than ever before.

Because we simply don't allow time for the harvest to ripen.

When we do have the opportunity to stop and plant the roses, as well as smell them, we must cherish and celebrate it. For with time and patience, great beauty will emerge.

More Tomatoes

 In addition to the plots in the community garden, have dug some area in the backyard this year. We're using old pallets as the borders.

Five more tomato plants, peppers, and herbs are the beginning.

Going to experiment with not using cages on these tomatoes, and see if they can be simply tied to a wire fence.