Finish your work. Copywriters, especially. Reading a bunch of 8-year old headlines you couldn't sell and not knowing what they could have been, sucks.
I usually work in longhand in my workbook until i get a sense of where i'm going.
Then it's faster to type so i switch to the keyboard.
Maybe it's that way for you. Any way that gets sentences down is cool.
Doesn't matter.
This does:
An ad is not done when you glue the headlines you typed in your workbook.
i've got hundreds of pages like this.
Headlines i never sold.
Some the art director didn't like, many i never told him or her about.
When you're writing them you want to get them down, you're typing fast, you may be saying them out loud to your partner & killing them as you go along.
Don't.
Ads (tv, poster, sticker, the format doesn't matter) aren't done when you know what they say.
Until you know what they look like, what they sound like, how they feel when they start, whether they have an ending or not, you're not done.
Good ideas are so hard to find you'd think we'd have more respect for them as we're trying to make them up.
A page full of headlines glued into my workbook now strikes me as a lot of missed opportunities, not proof that i deeply engaged with the subject.
I didn't take time to see the idea that each headline was a starting point for.
I didn't see the characters involved, the stage upon which each might have been played out as a drama.
Every headline you write is a starting point.
Don't dismiss them quickly.
Don't drop them because they don't have a comfortable rhythm.
See them acted out.
If there's excitement in a new thought that comes from that, drop the headline (don't worry, it's still in the book) and follow the new thought.
The farher away from an entry point you can take a line of thought, the less likely it will end up as a piece of work anyone has ever seen before.
Headlines are something to start with, not end up with.
Then it's faster to type so i switch to the keyboard.
Maybe it's that way for you. Any way that gets sentences down is cool.
Doesn't matter.
This does:
An ad is not done when you glue the headlines you typed in your workbook.
i've got hundreds of pages like this.
Headlines i never sold.
Some the art director didn't like, many i never told him or her about.
When you're writing them you want to get them down, you're typing fast, you may be saying them out loud to your partner & killing them as you go along.
Don't.
Ads (tv, poster, sticker, the format doesn't matter) aren't done when you know what they say.
Until you know what they look like, what they sound like, how they feel when they start, whether they have an ending or not, you're not done.
Good ideas are so hard to find you'd think we'd have more respect for them as we're trying to make them up.
A page full of headlines glued into my workbook now strikes me as a lot of missed opportunities, not proof that i deeply engaged with the subject.
I didn't take time to see the idea that each headline was a starting point for.
I didn't see the characters involved, the stage upon which each might have been played out as a drama.
Every headline you write is a starting point.
Don't dismiss them quickly.
Don't drop them because they don't have a comfortable rhythm.
See them acted out.
If there's excitement in a new thought that comes from that, drop the headline (don't worry, it's still in the book) and follow the new thought.
The farher away from an entry point you can take a line of thought, the less likely it will end up as a piece of work anyone has ever seen before.
Headlines are something to start with, not end up with.
5 Comments:
Great post, Mark. It takes a very short time in the ad biz to realize the value (personally and creatively) of having nice, fleshed out, nurtured "old" ideas.
At the worst, they're huge time savers for "round two" work or throwaway stuff (I know, I know ... heresy) for the same client. At the best, they're great springboards onto new, fresh and – ultimately – better work.
A man can never stop learning as long as there's someone worth learning from. Thank You Mark, you're a source of inspiration!
I can't believe that call last night. Pudge would never be so lucky...
And I agree with your blog.
As Mark posted a while back, get your stuff down in a workbook at any cost. I spent years throwing away ideas before I worked with Hal Curtis at Pagano. He had literally hundreds of black workbooks lined up on his shelves, each filled to the brim with ideas worthy of mining. (Of course, Hal started out as an AE, so maybe organization was beat into him.) Anyway, I now use workbooks religiously, because if you're gonna steal an idea from someone, why not Hal Curtis?
And now Mark is partnered with Hal! It really is a small world.
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