Good writers leave the office

Creativity & Communication

Leave the office

Before you even open your pad, open five other things: your ears, your eyes and your mind.

You’ll never be a good writer of anything if you just sit in your office and stare at your desk. Your raw material isn’t in the office or in Groucho’s for that matter. It’s out on the streets. Look at pictures. Listen to music. Go to films. See plays. And more importantly look at people. They’re those funny things with two legs we’re meant to be writing about, remember.

It sounds obvious but it’s amazing how many people in our incestuous little business just spend their spare time with other people in this incestuous little business.

Get out. And observe.

For instance, the Castlemaine XXXX campaign would never have happened if my parents hadn’t sent me to Australia to make a man of me. This it conspicuously failed to do. But it did teach me how to get bitten by a wild cockatoo, how to cheat at poker, and fifteen years later how to write an XXXX ad.

Notebook, swimming pool, 7.20pm:

One parent opens a bottle with her teeth while holding a towel. A teenager refills the same disposable bottle again. An older swimmer has wound an elastic band around the lid because wet hands slip.

Nobody says “seamless hydration solution”. That phrase exists in the brief because writers who read only category reports begin quoting one another’s inventions. Soon every snack is indulgent, every bank empowers and every bottle enables hydration. The industry agrees to be peculiar in private, then mistakes the agreement for customer language.

Observation supplies the awkward detail. Record the exact complaint. Notice the improvised repair. Ask what happened immediately before the person swore. A group discussing “ergonomics” may remove the elastic band because it looks trivial; the trivial thing identifies grip as the problem.

Leaving the desk can also become tourism. Collecting colourful remarks is useless when none changes the work. The test is whether the observation alters an assumption, a sentence or the thing being sold.

The next morning, the notebook sits beside the brief. “Seamless hydration solution” is crossed out. Underneath: “easy to open with wet hands”. A separate note goes to whoever specifies the lid. The elastic band remains in the margin with the time and place.