MarkFord
On November 18, I talked about moments that I love. One of them is when my boys call me for advice. AF, one of my brilliant nieces, must have read that, because a few days later she called to “ask for my advice.”
AF heads up a group of advertising copywriters for a publishing business in France. She said she felt that her team was sputtering out in terms of coming up with creative new ideas.
I gave her half a dozen suggestions. I can remember two of them…
Drawing from the same wells: You would think that creative people would always be looking for new ideas by constantly searching new and different sources. But oftentimes that’s not the case. Like the rest of us, creative people like to be in a zone of comfort. And that means reading the same half-dozen periodicals, consulting the same online “experts,” and expecting to find new insights by googling for them. That may have worked in the early 2000s, but it don’t cut it anymore. They must find new sources immediately. And they must start reading books rather than internet essays. Books are written by actual experts and will tend to have much deeper insights and much more useful facts and figures.
Expecting too little of themselves: The comfort zone for creatives is not just about researching ideas. It’s also about writing them down. As writers, we find a handful of rhetorical styles and structures we feel comfortable using. And so, we tend to use them. We also fall into a certain level of productivity that feels comfortable. But when it comes to creativity, comfort is a bad thing.