The difference between writing creatively and writing creatively toward a concept.

I learned a great lesson this Friday.

I learned the freedom of writing toward a concept rather than just trying to write creative lines.

That's right. 

I said its easier to write lines based on a strong concept than to just randomly come up with a bunch of smart lines without a concept.

On Friday morning I was asked to come up with with at least 3 workable lines for a poster campaign. I was asked to do this in 3 hours. 

I didn't have a concept, I had a visual and a partial brief.

For three hours I tried to pump out lines.

There were lines that were funny, ones that were clever, ones that were smart, there were no lines that focused the power of the visual to an idea.

I went to the meeting with my lines. I was thanked for my effort, told my lines were well written, but they weren't sure that they were paying off the concept.

None of the campaigns were 100% ready to go to the client, we all agreed to regroup again next week with our reimagined campaigns.

I grabbed the AD and we went and sat down.

This was the first time we'd even met on the project. She had worked with another writer who was going to be gone for a few days, so I was brought in. 

I talked to her about what the visual was supposed to convey. She gave me a one word explanation. I laughed. The one word was clearly a condensed version of what she was trying to convey. I asked her what about the product conveyed this word, she gave a reply. I then gave a reply.

For the next hour we listed off all the things that the word conveyed about our product, then I asked, of all these things this conveys, what is the only thin our competition can't claim.

After another 30 minutes we figured it out. That was our concept.

I wrote the first line of the campaign within 15 minutes of us finishing this conversation.

I showed it to the Senior writer and he was blown away.

I showed it to the CD and he said our campaign just grew legs.

So to recap, I spent 3 hours with no restrictions/directions on what I was supposed to write and came up with nothing.

I spent 1 hour and 30 minutes figuring out what our direction was, and 15 minutes writing the line (it won't always be that quick after figuring out the concept, today was a fluke) but my point is, that I wasted three hours writing without a concept and got nothing of value.

But as soon as I spent time figuring out what our concept was, writing for it became much simpler and more productive.

You'll hear that you can't do great work without a concept in School.

You'll see people do work that is conceptless that actually is good and think I can do that.

You probably can.

The point is, I spent an hour and a half less working on a concept and lines that actually work than I did working on conceptless lines that will never see the light of day.