Thursday, February 16, 2023

Dig Deep, Dig?




Let me start with an eek. 

Maybe even an eeeeeeeeeek.

It's Wednesday morning at nine as I write this.

I have a day's full of work and eleventeen zooms and I have no post for tomorrow.

People ask me, with some frequency, or they disparage me, with even more frequency, about my prolific-ness.

How can you write every day? Don't you think you should take a day off? What if you don't have any ideas?

I have about nine things to say about that.

First, let me quote Chuck Close, who said: "Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightening to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work.”

Most of the really good creative people I know--regardless of their field of endeavor, just start working. They doodle. They type. They put ingredients in a stew. They slather paint on a canvas. Sometimes they even start a story without know how it will come out. 

They go through life like a one-legged jockey. But somehow they keep their balance.

They trust their neural pathways, in other words. That, in the words of Brian Collins, you can plan serendipity, in a sense if you're awake to see it. You can start with a mistake, or randomness and if you work at it and don't overthink it, you will make something of the mush. At least some of the time. More often than doing nothing.

When I was in high school I took one course in creative writing. If you teach such a course, or even if you teach a portfolio class in advertising, about 75-percent of the time you'll be answering questions about how to break-through writer's block.

My high school teacher was very good and he had a simple trick that he taught me. He had me take a sheet of paper and fold it in half the long way. In the left column he had me write, "I hate." Then I had to fill the half page to the bottom. In the right column, I had to write, "I love." And complete that side too. 

Usually before I was four-inches down the page I had eleven or sixteen things to write about. 

In short, sometimes the best way to start writing is to start writing.

The second major thing I learned was from my favorite writer, Joseph Mitchell, of "New Yorker" fame. In one of his longer pieces in that magazine, he once described someone this way, "He went through life like an old-time waiter: with his head up."

Go through your day like an old waiter, with your head up. Hear dialogue, curses, insults on the street when you walk to work. Read graffiti, bumper stickers, New York Post headlines. See the smile of a pretty girl and hear a joke from the deli-guy when you get your corn, no butter, coffee, black. See a photo someone else has put into a comp, or from a magazine in your dentist's office. Listen to the birds sing followed by the contrapunto of jackhammers and taxi horns. Write that atonal symphony while thinking of Piet Mondrian's orderliness or Jackson Pollock's chaos. Hear the mathematical symmetry of Bach while taking in the pinball percussive sax of Charlie Parker. Throw yourself into something most people throw out. 

Dave Dye, in his great blog "Stuff From the Loft" tells this story about one of the greatest advertising campaigns in history.

Dave writes:

"You can work your balls off and still end up doing average work.

"This is why creative people develop techniques to provide themselves with inspiration.

"Some do these things instinctively; others have to learn.

Generally, it has to do with what John Salmon, creative director of CDP in the seventies, once memorably described as ‘displacement activities’.

"As its name suggests, this is doing something that displaces what you are supposed to be doing. For example, writing a TV campaign for Hamlet Cigars.

"It could be going to the pictures, going to an art gallery, or going to lunch.

"Or it could be when your working day is over, when you start to relax, and so does your brain.

"The most famous example of a displacement activity is, of course, the literal one of Archimedes. He cottoned on to his famous principle that a body displaces its own mass in water when his own body was doing just that, as he lay in his bath. 

"Tim and Roy had been working for a few days on Hamlet, but didn’t have anything yet that they considered good enough.
It was the end of another miserable day during which they had made little progress.

"To add to their gloom it was dark, cold and pouring with rain as they traipsed down the steps of 18 Howland Street and headed for the bus home.

"The bus arrived and they climbed the stairs to the upper deck.
In those days, the top decks of London buses were the preserve of smokers.

"Hard to imagine today, but the seats were filled with people puffing away on cigarettes and, in some cases, even pipes.
It may have been misty outside, but inside the bus could be a real peasouper of a fog, if you were sitting upstairs.

"Tim and Roy gratefully settled into their seats and each lit up a cigarette, something they hadn’t been able to do in the wet outside.

"The bus passed a poster of the Shultz cartoon character, Charlie Brown.

"The poster had a caption that began ‘Happiness is…’, taking this in, Tim settled back in his seat and said ‘Happiness is a dry cigarette on the top deck of a 134 bus’.

"The pair soon realised that if they changed what Tim had said to ‘Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet’, and put a suitably funny, but unfortunate event or situation in front of that line, they might have the campaign they’d been looking for.


"And so it proved."

Finally, as my daughters so often tell me, get over yourself.

When my wife and I went to the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, I learned something that I lean on a lot. 

Vincent painted 77 paintings in the last 70 days of his life. As an old friend used to curse, 'fuck me with an iron rod.'

In other words: 

Don't think, do. 
Don't perfect, be. 
Don't judge, play.

I'm not sure any of this answers the questions I set out to answer.

But it's 9:47 now.

And I have a post for tomorrow.





 

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