The valve

I mentioned TED before. If you haven't seen it, you really owe it to yourself to watch some of the talks. These people can charge a room of people thousands of dollars for a fleeting moment of their time and you can watch it all for free.

More recently I  saw Elizabeth Gilbert talk about creativity. This talk specifically.

It got me wondering as to how my creative process worked. Seeing how we egomaniacs have graciously labelled ourselves as creatives.

There are two modes of creativity that I experience. 

The first one is forced. At times we are asked to do the most mundane of tasks. Write a line to describe a series of exclusive bungalows. Sure you can make it sound nice, but our task here is to sell. So you sell it as best as you can in the tone and manner it requires. In this case one that is more hoity-toity works best. Yes, boring.*

Then there is the other mode.  Most often called upon when we have to solve a very LARGE problem. 

I don't often enter this mode. It triggers automatically and only after we have enough information and I've mulled over it long enough. It happens at any time. When we're smoking, when we're in a room discussing it, when I sit down and tell myself, "Ok look. This is what we're going to do". 

And all of a sudden it comes.

This blank state where I'm looking into nothing. I should be thinking about something, adding things together in my head, considering factors A-Z about audiences, what's been done before, if we can show this on TV, does it meet the brief?

But no, usually it's just blank.

Slowly something emerges, it's like a funnel right into my psyche. Something makes its way into my cranium and it comes as a whole. Not piece by piece. It grows until finally it's tangible enough for me grasp.

And then I say, "I have an idea".  

 

 

 

*To my ex-group head. If you're reading this and you know who you are, I know that I should take more pride in my work even with the shittiest of ads but there's only so much I can do with a property brochure. I also had 50 million more important things to do so I'm calling the priorities card on this one.