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Scott McKay is a Toronto strategist, writer, creative director, patient manager, half-baked photographer and forcibly retired playwright.

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    "They had their cynical code worked out. The public are swine; advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket."

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    "Advertising – a judicious mix of flattery and threats."

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    "Chess is as an elaborate a waste of time as has ever been devised outside an advertising agency."

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    Entries in AGO (1)

    Sunday
    Apr182010

    plug that metaphor

    DateSunday, April 18, 2010 at 9:47PM

    I've always been a little suspect of metaphors concerning creativity. Much like Sir Bedevere in The Holy Grail ("and that, my lord, is how we know the earth to be banana-shaped") you can too easily find yourself making grandiose statements that aren't tethered to reality, or like anti-evolution creationists, ignoring facts that don't fit your particular grandiosity.

    Still, although I can't speak to any theories of creativity or neurology or how the consciousness works, after days and weeks of cranking out ideas and designs and copy and meetings and presentations, at some point you really kind of do need to recharge.

    The empty/refill metaphor feels real to me, and I suspect to every creative I've worked with. Because I think we've all been there; feeling listless before you start the job, unable to get excited about anything concerning what you have to do. That's not a good place to be, and you have to do something to change it.

    How do I recharge? As you can tell from this little site, photography has become a hobby over the last year. I don't want to say anything in a photograph, I just want to take a picture that makes me want to look at it again. That's an enormously liberating thing when everything you do every day has to have a meaning or ladder back to a strategy.

    Two things I don't do enough of are reading (ancient and WW II history mostly) and get to the AGO, where there's generally a good mix of the familiar and the new. (Yeah, I know it's not the Uffizi, but it serves its purpose.)

    The only thing I can generalize about is that I think you actively have to do something to recharge; sitting in front of a TV or a computer simply isn't engaging enough, and probably isn't even really relaxing. The best thing you can do may be whatever engages your creativity in a totally different way, and takes you farthest away from whatever you're used to; it may also be the most relaxing thing.

    I'm interested in what you the readers of this thing do to recharge, or to revivify whatever creative metaphor you subscribe to. Please share, anonymously if you prefer.

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