Creativity Squared: Why Wit and Words Are Bob Fitzgerald’s Suit of Armour

I’m contradictory. Which is not much of an answer but also tells you a good deal about me. - see what I mean? I am bitterly optimistic, ironically idealistic and hopefully disenchanted. I have concealed myself in a veneer of blaise and enthusiastic indifference. I am a creative and a writer. Someone who learned from a very early age that a sharp wit and expansive vocabulary can get you far in this world. Wit and words can give you a strong suit of armour, protecting, and also a ready means of connection. For years I had quoted Oscar Wilde: “The shortest distance between two people is a laugh.” Unfortunately, I recently learned it was actually Victor Borge, not that there’s anything wrong with the Danish born, conductor, comedian, monologist and radio personality. It just doesn’t have the same pizzazz. But, anyhow, regardless of who said it, the sentiment is 100% accurate. I am the kind of creative that in his painfully awkward adolescence, learned acceptance is easily granted to the smart mouthed, cuttingly anti-authoritarian class clown. Although sometimes the overuse of exotic verbiage grows tedious. I am an introvert who protects his reticent reflections with an almost bombastic facade of extraversion. I am this kind of creative (which given my many years in creative departments is sort of de rigueur - although the vocabulary thing is more of my kind of thing personally)

From my earliest days in this business, I’ve always had an almost primal way of assessing the creativity of any piece of work - Does it make me jealous? But I suppose, like my first answer, it is more about my foibles than my methods. 

So professionally I look for a connection. Something that I have, know, understand, feel or experienced connected to the thing the ad is trying to sell. Like the Staples back to school spot of many years ago. Running in late August through September, the spot featured the Christmas song, It’s the most wonderful time of the year. As the soundtrack plays you see a father joyfully filling a cart with back-to-school supplies followed by two utterly dejected children. I immediately got it, deciding then and there that if and when I had children I’d back-to-school shop there. In thirty seconds they connected with me  using an emotion and experience I hadn’t even experienced yet - the joy of parents getting their lives back. That is creative.

Or does the work make me feel something? Like Nike or those P&G mom ads they run around the Olympics. Great creativity creates emotions. And emotions create connections. Wherein the connections leads to sales or awareness or whatever else the work is intended to deliver.

I kind of think of the creative process as a game of chicken where you're in one car and failure, embarrassment, banality and unemployment are in the other. And the sooner you swerve away almost inevitably the less creative, inspiring or interesting your work will be. And there are things you’re going to need to hold the wheel as the speedo climbs and the distance closes. Firstly it helps if you have some emotional issues, see my first answer. Not so much a full-on psychological problem, but maybe an issue or two around approval seeking or self esteem. Secondly it takes bravery. Not the valorous kind of a soldier or heroic kind of the fire fighter, but bravery nonetheless. If you are going to do something that breakthrough and awe inspiring it is creativity you’ve got to venture off into the unknown. Speaking of the unknown, creative work requires curiosity. If you’re going to make something that’s powerful about organic eggs or German cars or life insurance, you’ve got to know about those things. You have to get into them, learn the basics of the business and its crazy quirky parts too. If you’re not bringing up odd, non-sequiturish facts about clients around the family dinner table you’re not doing it right. 

Most of all you need a good, solid, trustworthy partner. I’ve been especially fortunate in this regard.

And how do you know you’re ‘done’? That the idea is as great as it's ever going to get and ready to change the world? It’s when there’s no more time to work on it.

Without rehashing my earlier answers, the external factors that have shaped me as a creative are my collected experiences as a human being existing on this planet. In total. My life has made me the creative I am today. Like the way I write. Oftentimes people comment on the way I write, how my sentences seem to turn in interesting directions or my word choices are unexpected. I have come to believe that my writing style is one of the most powerful aspects of my creativity. I also believe that I developed my approach to writing because of my dyslexia. I am so old that dyslexia was just becoming a thing when someone finally figured out that was what was going on with me. I had been described as a “lazy speller” or “lacking an attention to detail” around my writing assignments. The truth was, I couldn’t think of how to spell a lot of words. And I couldn’t even really imagine how it might be spelled to look it up in the dictionary. And you had to actually get the big giant book and flip through the pages. So like probably, which with the help of autocorrect is pretty straightforward to write, would be spelled ‘probly’ or ‘probably’ So instead I would use ‘most likely’ or ‘a sort of sure thing’ It kept me out of trouble as a student and contributed mightily to my success as a copywriter. 

Creativity takes all of it. The girl I dated freshman year. The odd things I somehow learned about dairy cows at some point in my life. My relationship with my father. Or, even, to bring things back around, my teenage crush on Chrissie Hynde which brought to The Pretenders lyric in the song Message of Love. “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” which I then learned was actually a quote from Irish poet and playwright, Oscar Wilde. That led me to explore Victorian writers, study at the Abbey Theater in Dublin and ultimately misattribute a quote to him which I would later cite as I wrote an article about creativity.

To some up, creativity pulls from every aspect and facet of your experience. It requires a good bit of vulnerability and some disregard for the consequences of failure. And an ability uniquely to bring things together in a way that will spark understanding and ultimately connection.