Check out my open letter to Comcast over at Midwestern Gothic.

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It seems like the Web 2.0 world and hyper integrated world of marketing and advertising today, there’s a lot of over-thinking going on.

Sure, dynamic content, super-segmented messaging and ideas that meet hundreds of marketing criteria have a very valuable place in the whole corporation to consumer conversation but…

What about an idea that’s just freakin’ cool?

Every once and awhile, as a creative, I think you’ve just got to take a step back and have some fun every once and awhile if you find yourself trying to think about how you can get a 23 year-old African American male who just graduated college and likes to read books about the French Foreign Legion to convert while playing an online game and buy a roll of toilet paper.

Ideas in today’s creative marketplace get looked at through countless filters. Is it politically correct enough? Is it segmented enough? Is it extendable enough? Can it go viral? Does it further a conversation between consumers?

Next time you come up with ideas, try applying the fun filter and see how many of your ideas live after that.

Hopefully you don’t discover you’re too boring.

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So if you remember my post about the short film I entered in Steven Spielberg’s reality show On The Lot, you probably figured I’d be super-geeked about watching the show, even though I didn’t get on it.

Hey, I won’t hate. The audio in my short sucked and the camera work could have used quite a bit of improvement. I might not have picked myself either.

But the format they’re presenting the show in makes it hard to watch, if not impossible to watch. I’ll stick through the bloody end, but here are my reasons why I don’t think this show is going to catch on.

• The first episode took two hours to screen 18 1-minute films. And that’s all they did, other than give us a thirty-second intro to the filmmakers. No behind the scenes, no drama, nothing that makes a show like Project Runway so addictive.
• The results show dragged on and on. And then they brought a dead horse back to life and rode it around the stage some more.
• Carrie Fisher, god bless her gold-bikini, martini drinking soul, is the worst lead judge ever. She stumbles across her words, she looks lost and she rambles. Worse, her criticism doesn’t even make sense. She’ll awkwardly rip someone for a minute, and then say “so, congratulations” at the end of it. I can picture Chewie roaring somewhere.
• Is George Marshall even relevant anymore?

That said, I think some of the people they have on the show are brilliant. I’d easily pay 8 bucks for a ticket to see what Zach Lipofsky would do with a million dollar development deal.

I’ll watch the whole thing, but I don’t think America will. There goes my shot at getting on the show next year.

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Numero Uno - You spend little or no time actually writing. Sure, you always think about writing and you always talk to other people about what you’re writing. But if you need less than two hands to count your weekly word count, you’re not a writer.

Number Two - You think being published equals success. Sure, that can be a goal. But I’m willing to bet some of the best, most interesting writing in the world is unpublished. Set goals for yourself, and stop counting on others to validate you.

Number Three - You always start talking about your writing by saying “This isn’t very good so…” This is my biggest pet peeve. I understand being nervous and struggling with criticism. But by saying your work isn’t good before anyone ever hears or reads it, what kind of expectations are you setting for yourself? Let them be their own judge and let the chips fall where they may.

Number Four - You copy other writers verbatim. There’s nothing wrong with trying to imitate somebody’s style. It’s actually a good idea until you’re confident in your own voice. Plus, you’ll never really imitate a Hemingway or a Faulkner, but what you come up with will sound different and be uniquely yours. But if you take actual sentences and just start stitching them together, you’re nothing more than a Frankenstein.

Number Five - You quit on your stories after one rejection. Show your writing to a hundred people, and you’ll get a hundred different opinions. One person isn’t going to make or break you. If you believe in something, show it to as many people as possible. Someone will like it. Some may love it.

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So, Jenn over at All Freelance Writing Jobs wants to know what kind of writing keeps me coming back for more.

It’s a tough decision. I’m a web copywriter during the day, and I like that enough to take the constant abuse of creative directors and clients. But when I think about my dream job, I’m not necessarily at a desk in an office thinking about how to make a “Next” button friendlier.

My first love was fiction. Right now I’m devoting 1,000 words a day of output to that, and I’m loving every second of it. I really like the story and characters I have going. Plus, who wouldn’t like to be riding the bus and see a complete stranger reading a book with your name on it.

By the narrowest of margins, screenwriting comes out on top. This probably wouldn’t be the case if I didn’t also like directing. Because I can actually make the shorts I write, I can see my vision come to life just how I want it. I can write novels ’till I’m blue in the face and never get published. With the new digital age and screenwriting, I can make a finished project and release it myself.

Let’s see, I’ll tag:

Robert James Russell at Midwestern Gothic

J. Ott over at Making the Movie

Susan Falter Barnes at The Get Known Now Blog

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Ah, to be young and have all the time in the world. Not that I’m “old” in any sense of the word, but having a full-time job, wife, son and this pesky writing addiction I can’t kick doesn’t really leave me with a lot of free time to pursue other hobbies.

When I was in middle school, I read and drew comics for fun.

Ten years later, I don’t do these things.

Is that the price of focusing on a craft and devoting all your energy to it? It seems that the older people get, the more specialized and narrowly focused they get as well.

Specialization is the death knell of staying sharp creatively.

Creativity is all about taking two things that were never together before and connecting them in a way that’s meaningful. If you never try new things or dabble in different hobbies, you run the risk of not seeing and being inspired by those new connections.

Go outside your specialized comfort zone and do something that requires an entirely different part of your brain.
What passion have you given up that you want to rekindle? Sound off in the comments.

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Latoya over at Writer’s Brew tagged me, so now that means I’m going to write about why I blog. And here we go!

To Get Noticed - Getting readers for your blog is day-in, day-out work. But the larger an audience you have, the better chance that my network knows someone who knows someone who can help me.

To Get Feedback - Blogging is instant publishing. I don’t have to send a million query letters to editors to find out if my work is good or not. My readers can tell me.

To Exercise Creatively - Because there’s an instant payoff to blogging (i.e. seeing my work in “print”), I’m more motivated to do it and experiment in ways that I normally couldn’t with something time intensive like a novel or screenplay.

To Find Others Like Me - The blogosphere (so 2004) is a huge, mutual link-love fest. Which means there are other people actively looking to get link-love from me. Which means I get to see a lot of great, helpful things other people are doing. I also get a lot of spam, which isn’t cool. But seeing everyone’s ideas, is.

To Make Money - Yeah. I’ll say it. Either by getting a job, advertising on the site, or from someone wanting to publish some of my writing. Definitely not the be all, end all, but a factor.

And now I’ll tag some other blogs. I’m interested to see what they have to say, and you should be too.

Tell Us Why You Blog…
Logic + Emotion

$1000 Film

Six Figure Writers

ProBlogger

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Any idiot can make something complicated. It takes smarts, passion and a healthy dose of excruciating pain to make something simple.

But simple ideas are the ones that work the best.

If a person has to figure too many things out to get what you are trying to say, you’ve probably failed. There’s a lot of power in something that people “get” just by looking at it.

A lot of creatives look at their ideas and think “There’s nothing too this. It’s too simple.” Wrong! What you should be saying “This isn’t simple enough!”

Simple does not mean boring. Simple means finding the essence of your idea, the main point that you want to get across, and making everything serve that. If every detail and layer you’ve added to what you’re creating builds on that central idea in a significant way, and in a way that people understand in one second, you’ve succeeded.

Now go subtract something!

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Angela Booth had an interesting thought over at her writing blog today.

Many writers think that they procrastinate, when it turns out that they don’t leave room it in their writing lives for gestation . Every writing project needs time to “cook” so to speak. A gestation period is vitally necessary, and if you don’t leave time for your projects to gestate, you’ll find writing much more difficult than it should be.

How do you know when gestation is over?

Ideas for the project will suddenly stream into your mind.

I find this is true at the initial part of the ideation process. Half-thoughts and snippets of ideas drift in and out of my mind, and I generally paint in the details of a good idea over a period of time where I don’t specifically think about it.

I make sure to write these thoughts down as they come, sometimes over month long periods. Then, if I’m excited enough about the idea, I sit down and bring all my separate thoughts together to create a fleshed out idea.

At this point, I usually know if it’s worth working on further, or if I need to kill it.

There is a difference between procrastination and gestation - you have tangible results at the end of one of them. And I’m not talking about new high scores in Free Cell.

See the original post

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CNN reported on an interesting study done by the good folks over at Harvard’s Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital (maybe you’ve heard of them).

According to them, the brain’s “default setting” is to daydream. In fact, we’ve got quite a bit of hardware to support it.

“There is this network of regions that always seems to be active when you don’t give people something to do,” psychologist Malia Mason said.

Science now seems to provide reasoning to something creatives have known all along.

Ideas come out of nowhere at the oddest of times.

When your brain is down, it’s jumping from thought to thought, not really focusing on anything. It seems to be the best way to do free-thinking without constraints. Trouble is, you have to do nothing, to do it.

Make sure you always carry a pen and paper. Let yourself drift off every once and awhile. Then, when that idea hits out of nowhere, you’ll be ready to capture it.

For instance, I always have to carry pen and paper when I drive. Ideas seem to always hit me when I’m on the open road, ready to succumb to highway hypnosis.

Check the original article

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