all talk and no action

Last week I went on a course on how to be more creative. Some of the points raised were obvious, but still useful as they’re easily forgotten, such as the fact that an increase in stress leads to a decrease in creativity – which is why our best ideas tend to come to us when we’re away from the desk thinking about something else.

One tip which I found really useful, both for editors looking to commission a great piece, and writers pitching ideas, was this:

Think of an idea that will get you fired.

As an example, a car magazine editor’s resignation might be delivered in the form of a piece called “how to print your own fake tax disc and MOT certificate”.

From that, a usable idea could be “how criminals fob you off with fake MOT certificates that you won’t spot”, or “how to spot a fake MOT certificate and avoid buying an insurance write-off”, or “how the trade in fake documents is turning roads into death traps”. I’m sure there are loads more.

It’s a great exercise and one that will hopefully help fellow writers and editors get out of that awful oh my god my creativity has gone and everyone’s going to find out that I had no idea what I was doing all along moment. Give it a try.

A long time ago, when I worked at another publishing company, a bunch of people in the office played five-a-side football after work. To co-ordinate this, and to invite new people to play, the organiser would send out three or four emails every day with the subject header “footie!” and a message along the lines of “five-a-side footie this week, anyone want to play?”

After a week or two of these annoying emails, I decided that it would be a really smart move to set up an auto responder, so that any email arriving with the subject header “footie!” would result in the sender receiving a reply that said “f**k off, I hate football” and eventually I’d stop getting the mails.

You can see where this is going already, can’t you?

All was going swimmingly, until a few days later, when an eager reader decided to mail me to let me know about his new football web site – with the subject header “footie!”. What are the chances of that?

Checking my email that day, I watched as the progress bar showed my mail downloading. And then I watched again in horror as my email program replied to this unfortunate reader with my carefully crafted reply. A hastily written “I’m sorry if you received a strange email, it looks as though I have a virus” did no good – that was the last I heard from him.

So if you email me with an obvious question and it takes a while for me to reply, you’ll know why. But at least you know you’ll receive a personally written response, and that it won’t be full of insults.