VersaQuill

Other articles in this series:  see Important Posts.

What’s the difference between seeking inspiration and overcoming writer’s block? Writer’s block is an obstacle—a thinking problem to be overcome. Inspiration is a solution, delightful but unpredictable. You can lay out the welcome mat, but you can’t say exactly when inspiration will arrive.

What is inspiration?

When you feel inspired, it’s not that you suddenly possess facts and wisdom that you didn’t have before. It’s that you’ve made a connection you hadn’t made before. “The secret of all effective originality in advertising,” said Leo Burnett, “is not the creation of new and tricky words and pictures, but one of putting familiar words and pictures into new relationships.” Inspiration is your subconscious mind putting order into material that your conscious mind was too cluttered, distracted, or anxious to sort out.

Tidy up your desktop

Making connections is all about tidying up your mind. I talked in Positioning, Concepts, and Copywriting about how concepts help organize what’s in your conscious mind. Using them is the equivalent of stacking the papers on your desk into tidy piles by subject. You group things into categories and divide them into subcategories. You regroup depending on your current context and purpose.

For example: if your job is to write an ad for Mary’s Net Café, you can think of it as a coffe-shop with wireless access, or a French pastry shop where you can email your best friend, or a café whose La-Z-Boy recliners have laptop desks. Which category and subcategory you choose to emphasize in the ad depends on what Mary’s customers want most, and what Mary’s competitors are offering.

Keep your mental filing cabinets in order

This sorting and identification process is also crucial for your subconscious mind. It’s the equivalent of putting legible, logical labels on your mental file folders, so that when they drop from your conscious to your subconscious mind—from your desk into your filing cabinet—you can still find them. (And they will drop: see Crows and Copywriters.)

How can you keep track of all the useful knowledge and experience you’ve accumulated over the years in your filing cabinets? That depends mostly on how much effort you originally put into filing the stuff. Suppose you see Miller’s classic ad, “Everything you always wanted in a beer. And less.” If you only go as far as thinking, “Hah! funny,” perhaps you’ll remember Miller Lite the next time you’re buying beer.

Suppose, however, that you put into words what makes that ad stand out: use of paradox, use of macho men to sell a low-cal product, use of celebrity testimonials. Then the ad will get stashed under the right categories in your mental filing cabinets. That makes it more likely to turn up when you’re trying to promote a deodorant that makes men smell nice, or a sweetener that has half the calories of sugar but all the taste.

Beyond keeping your filing cabinets in order, how can you help inspiration along? David Ogilvy puts it very clearly:

Big ideas come from the unconscious. This is true in art, in science, and in advertising. But your unconscious has to be well informed, or your idea will be irrelevant. Stuff your conscious mind with information, then unhook your rational thought process. (Ogilvy on Advertising, p. 16)

How can you stuff your consciousness? See the next post.

NOTE: This post was inspired by a recent post on Copyblogger, 10 Pathways to Inspired Writing. The author and the commentors offered a wealth of ideas, some of which were for seeking inspiration, some of which were for overcoming writer’s block.

Recommended Reading

Regular readers of this blog will have noticed by now that I’m a fan of Ayn Rand—and not just of her bestselling novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. This blog is about thinking for copywriters, and it’s Ayn Rand’s ideas–as explained in her nonfiction works–that have allowed me to think clearly about copywriting and many other topics.

Looking at the paperback editions of Rand’s nonfiction recently, it occurred to me that their blurbs break a couple copywriting commandments. The blurbs stress features rather than benefits, and they speak in language that isn’t shared by the target audience. Here are some comments that seem more to the point, which I’ll be posting presently as an Amazon review.

Ayn Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Rev. ed.

I was a straight-A student in high school and college, but I didn’t learn to think until I read Ayn Rand. Her philosophy (specifically her epistemology, which deals with how you know what you know) answers those thorny but important questions that put my philosophy professors in a tizzy. Does the fact that a pencil in water looks broken mean you can’t trust anything your senses tell you? Do words (concepts) correspond to something to reality, or can you use them as politicians do, to mean anything you want? Can you know anything for certain?

Of Ayn Rand’s nonfiction books, this one was definitely the most challenging to get through: I had to rethink so much of what I “knew.” In the long run, though, it was the most worthwhile. Her demonstration of how to think showed me how to use reason to deal with people and the world. Because of her theories, I see the world as a place that I can understand, and where I can not only survive but ultimately achieve my own happiness. If you’ve read Atlas, think of the scene where the heroine wakes up in a sunlit valley, smiles, and asks, “We never had to take any of it seriously, did we?” The ideas in ITOE are the foundation for that kind of smile.