By late fall, most of those brilliant ideas you’ve been tucking away for the holiday production rush have already either been used up or assigned away. But how many more times before Christmas will a smiling face pop in the door begging for best creative work ever?
What if the key to unlocking brilliantly creative copy and production was much simpler than you thought? Science say it is.
One of the things you learn writing and producing for a network is to adapt to the speed of things. Every day is like the Christmas rush. Every production order wants your best creative work ever. And there’s a reason producers at this level are so good.
But it’s not talent. It’s math.
THE SCIENCE OF CREATIVE BREAKTHROUGHS
Keith Simonton, a leading Psychologist in the study of Creativity at UC Davis studied thousands of works by composers, scientists, and inventors and found that creative success follows a shockingly simple statistical probability. Thomas Edison, known for the lightbulb and first precursor to the record player filed over 1,000 patents for those 2 brilliant ideas. Picasso created more than 20,000 works of art. The takeaway? Quantity is the key to more reliable creative breakthroughs.
The busiest time of the year means you’ve got the perfect petrie dish to grow creative brilliance in. But it’s not just the amount of creative you do. It’s about the growth curve. Malcom Gladwell, a Cognitive Scientist boiled his study of the mathematics of creativity into ‘the 10,000 hour rule’: the longer you invest in the same skill, the faster your growth rate becomes. It’s like compound interest that pays more, faster, for every time you write more options and take on more work.
If only radio allowed for the time to just sit alone and slow brew beautiful creative ideas, right? It turns out, radio has the exact conditions we need to become brilliantly creative even faster. Science has proven that the most brilliant creativity emerges at what scientists call ‘the edge of chaos’ – the tipping point between total randomness and rigid order. When deadlines overlap and priorities are unclear you’ll find that your output is lackluster at best. When systems are too restrictives or unrealistic, nothing fresh appears. But dead in the middle you’ll find creativity you haven’t even begun to unleash.
Radio is built for this. Deadlines and directives quickly whittle down what could otherwise be a sea of creative choices. Systems and software limitations offer an instant structure. Together they poke and prod us into the perfect narrow lane to run our best ideas through causing our creative stream to flow more efficiently.
THE KEY TO MASTER LEVEL CREATIVITY
So am I telling you that you should be grateful for the holiday rush? I know better than that. More is better, and constraints are helpful. But it’s this last scientific discovery that will tie the perfect bow on a holiday-ready shortcut to incredible creativity if you let it.
Cognitive Scientist Margaret A. Boden discovered a key that should change the way you see your creative potential forever. Her work proved that it’s not just doing the same thing over and over that eventually makes you better. It’s the development of this one skill: getting more practice at repackaging the building blocks of an idea.
If we can begin to see the elements of each piece of production as building blocks we can easily unlock the fastest path not only to more creative ideas, but to the best ones, every time. But…how?
I’m going to give you a radio ready, rush-time production tip that will not only save you time but literally train you to unleash your creative potential. And it’s so simple it’ll feel like cheating.
PUT THIS INTO ACTION TODAY
Q4 is a gift to producers who want to unleash their creative potential. It gives you the most opportunities to test your skills, the best parameters (deadlines and system constraints) to nudge your ideas into that golden zone. Now let’s look at the building blocks inside a piece of production to se
Production by the Block
Constraints:
:30, annual local holiday event, audience is station avatar, mood is celebration, bonus payback is attaching that happy community feeling to your stations name
Creativity Building Blocks:
- Opening line
- Music Bed
- Effects
- Holiday words (how are we telling them it’s a holiday event?)
- Endearing words (how are we connecting our station to the event? These words leave a feeling)
- Closer
Pull out last years spots for one of those annual recurring end of year production orders and try this.
- Identify what you used in each block.
- For this years spot, come up with 2-3 options for each block. Each decision will determine the exact copy and tone of the finished spot.
- With just 3 options for all 6 blocks you could write up to 729 completely different spots!
Creativity can be found the long way… or you can use the power of science to get there faster. The fewer little decisions we have to make the more room our brains have to regenerate and refine more creative ideas.
Here’s to your most creative copy ever.
Kim Snyder is the creative force behind the nationally recognized radio avatar “Linda,” the cornerstone of Christian radio branding. As lead writer and producer for K-LOVE and Air1 for over a decade, her campaigns helped define the voice of a generation. Today, Kim consults through ChristianRadioCoaching.com where her signature insights continue to shape the future of faith-based media.