The creative muscle is like any real muscle, it can be trained, it can grow, but most importantly it can whither neglect. It is vital to our careers as marketers to nurture this muscle from time to time, whether by taking a short vacation, doing pro-bono work for an interesting client, or by engaging in other extra-curricular activities. One activity that is a good workout for anyone in a writing-intensive industry is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo.
NaNoWriMo is a month-long contest through November for writers. The challenge is to write a 50,000+ word novel from scratch in a month. Thousands of writers participate each year (over 100k in 2007) and thousands actually cross the finish line with 50,000 word manuscripts by the end of the month.
But the point isn’t merely to finish something like NaNoWriMo. The point is to participate. Just think, even if your novel goes unpublished, you’ve now penned 50,000 words of a unique story. The month-long timeframe pushes you to budget your time. You don’t spend hours pondering plot holes or picking “the right” word for a piece of dialogue. You work as hard as you can, sometimes writing stream-of-consciousness segments, to finish on time.
Think about jogging. If all you ever do is jog in the morning, you’ll never push yourself to get faster. True, many of us don’t have the desire or need to run faster or longer, but if you’re a professional runner you do (For most professional marketers, writing is just like jogging to an athlete). To learn to run faster, you enter into races and push your body. You train and work hard to improve your skills and become more competitive as a result.
While I doubt my NaNoWriMo novel will actually be published, the act of writing one will help me hone my creative edge. Pushing myself to write 50,000 words in a month will help me learn to budget writing time so I can write press releases and other marketing materials in more timely manners.
What other things can marketers do to foster their creativity? To exercise their creative muscles?
