If there is such a thing as a creative process, it involves taking a stab, getting it wrong and then working out how to make it right. Sometimes, many times.
James Joyce famously threw the complete manuscript for his debut novel into the fire after a number of publishers rejected it. He went on to rethink and rewrite the novel entirely from scratch, resulting in one of the greatest works of Irish literature: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Ernest Hemingway once said to an aspiring writer, “The first draft of anything is shit.” He should know. Hemingway apparently rewrote the first part of A Farewell to Arms more than fifty times before he was satisfied.
I’m not suggesting this is how your own creative projects should unfold. No marketer has the time or the budget for that many revisions. But one or two revisions are virtually unavoidable. And the very fact that we need revisions suggests that creativity is never an easy process. Very rarely does creativity nail it on the first go.
Creation is a long journey where most turns are wrong and most ends are dead.
Kevin Ashton, How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention and Discovery
A game of drafts
It’s commonly said that writing is editing. A first draft can always be improved upon.
(Don’t trust a writer who proudly boasts they only ever write one draft. After many years as an editor for both print magazines and websites, I promise you that first draft needs work. Usually lots of work.)
The initial draft is the clay to be moulded, the foundations on which to build. As a result, a significant amount of that first draft may eventually be deleted or completely rewritten.
When writing a more thoughtful or reflective blog post like this one, my process, and many other writers I’ve worked with, routinely involves writing 2-3,000 words in search of the 1,200 or so that will eventually be published. That’s quite a lot of wrong words on the way to finding the right ones.
For example, the opening paragraphs you read at the beginning of this article were far from the first words I wrote when I opened the blank page on my computer. James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway didn’t feature in the first draft at all. But when I needed a couple of colourful examples to make a point, these two stories came to mind. And then I felt they worked as attention-grabbers to open the article. Always be prepared to deconstruct and rebuild as new ideas come along.
It’s not just writing either. Think about a typical branding project. The designer will likely present the client with three very different logo mockups, each inspired by different aspects of the company in question. The client chooses one and suggests further modifications. The other two designs are rejected.
But that doesn’t mean all of the time and effort put into these rejected designs and flawed drafts are wasted. Each of these wrongs is a step on the way to uncovering the right design, the best draft, the freshest idea.
In many ways, creativity is driven by a continual process of trial and error. Did this work? No. What about this?
Creativity needs permission to fail – and fail often.
Failing upwards
History is littered with stories of creativity and invention that came about because of a mistake or chance happening.
Dr Alexander Fleming already had a reputation for being somewhat careless in the lab, so no one was too surprised when he returned from a two-week holiday to discover mould had contaminated one of the staphylococcus culture plates he’d prepared before leaving.
But rather than throw out the plate and start again, Fleming noticed something interesting about how the mould restricted the bacterial growth he had been trying to cultivate.
And that’s how he discovered penicillin.
It’s a modern “eureka” moment, except for the fact that Fleming didn’t run through the streets naked. (Then again, neither did Archimedes as the famous story of the bath, a splash and a naked dash through the streets of Ancient Greece likely never happened.)
The point is that inspiration didn’t come about through methodical application but through some chance event – often entirely accidental. The creative process comes from recognising the significance of the event – whether that’s mould in a culture plate or water spilling out of a bath – and being willing to go where that new idea takes you.
I can’t tell you the number of times an article of mine has morphed into something completely different to the original concept because a turn of phrase or piece of research suddenly opened up new and more interesting avenues. “Ooh, that analogy works really well. What if I made that the central theme instead?”
This is why creativity isn’t easily forced into a series of formulas or repeatable processes. By definition, a formulaic approach relies on repeating what has worked before. It’s a recipe. Use these exact ingredients and follow these techniques and you too can have a wonderful mushroom stroganoff just like the one in the photo.
Yes, following a recipe means you stand a much better chance of serving up something edible for dinner, but it’s not your recipe. All of the creativity belongs to whoever first devised the dish and wrote down the instructions.
A recipe or process attempts to shortcut past all the messy thinking – all the trial and error – with a series of predetermined and repeatable steps to achieve the outcome as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Except all that messy thinking is where the creativity actually happens.
Learning from your mistakes
We embrace the idea of experimentation – of trial and error – easily enough in other areas of marketing.
A/B testing is all about pitting two ideas against each other to see which is more right, or less wrong, than the other. We routinely test lines of copy, web design elements and email subject lines on a small segment of the audience to see which outperforms the other.
Data driven marketing is also informed by insights into which campaigns, which assets, which landing pages failed and shouldn’t be repeated and which can be improved or optimised further.
Digging deeper into your data can also help you to understand why a particular campaign or content asset didn’t perform as expected. For example, perhaps it wasn’t the writing of the blog post that missed the mark but where it was published and how it was promoted. Perhaps the campaign itself was sound but the timing was off or the audience demographics weren’t appropriately targeted.
And that’s ultimately the point. Yes, it’s useful to know what worked and what didn’t. But it’s far more valuable to understand why something underperformed. Knowing the why can open up new creative opportunities and spark fresh ideas.
Your mistakes, mishaps and misses can only inform your creative process if you’re willing to accept what they tell you and follow where they lead.
