On creativity.

“An artist is someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain fully functional.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Box?  What box?

Everyone in marketing communications earns their bread by being “creative.” We are measured by the level of “creativity” that we bring to the table. It’s a constant challenge. But one develops a habit of not being linear; of “thinking outside the box.”

And yet it’s enormously challenging to explain to non-marketing people exactly what we do and how we do it.  There’s a story that keeps circulating among us on Web boards about a writer who was hired to do an ad.  He did it; he brought it to the client along with a bill, and the client said, “That’s not very long, is it?  How long did it take you to write it?”  The writer responded, “About 25 years.”

We develop our craft over time.

I can write far more quickly today than when I first began.  A lot of that is the result of an evolving ability to make better and better judgement calls – we learn to more quickly recognize what works and what doesn’t the more we practice our craft.  We also know how to jump-start our thinking to put things in motion.

Many people think that “creativity” is some kind of voo-doo.  That we’re selling snake oil.  Alas, there are far more who misunderstand us than those who recognize and appreciate what a good copywriter can do.

“Writing is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.”  – Jules Renard

Sometimes creativity is genius.

J. S. Bach wrote The Brandenburg Concertos as a kind of job application – a job he never got, and the concertos remained in some drawer for a couple of hundred years before anyone even played them. To me, he’s still the pinnacle of human creativity, and yet I can’t help thinking that in his own mind he always saw himself as a church organist (orgelmeister) who had to write a new cantata every week to support himself and his very large family.

And wasn’t Einstein exceptionally creative? The mere ability to think of light bending in space means that one’s mind is not bound by existing knowledge – one “creates” new ideas as one comes to a kind of enlightenment.

Then there’s creativity that borders on magic in all the technology we see coming into being on a daily basis, such as more and more functional flat-screen applications.

I will leave you with two quotes on this subject:

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke

“The real technology – behind all our other technologies – is language.  It actually creates the world our consciousness lives in.” – Andrei Codrescu