Magic and ritual part of creative conundrum

CREATIVE people in advertising are as sensitive as blowfish. We can work ourselves up at the slightest provocation. Recently, our agency conducted an office reshuffle. My partner and I picked up the contents of our office and resettled them in precisely the same way in a new office down the passage. We even ensured we were sitting in the same positions. This almost perfect replica was necessary because, on some subconscious level, we knew that anything too different would cause a shift in our creative tectonic plates.

And that would not be a good thing. This is when I started to realise that creative people are not merely sensitive. We’re complex. We’re conundrums. We’re contradictory. And we need to be to do what we do.

It starts with the little routines and rituals. For instance, on our side of the building, we’ve established that the optimal air-conditioning temperature is 23°C, with the fan at low speed. I need my special clutch pencil with 2H lead in order to brainstorm. My partner hates Prestik on the walls.

As Anne Lamott, author of Stitches, puts it: “The wonder of life is often most easily recognisable through habits and routines.” Creative people know that there is an everpresent wrecking ball waiting in the wings to smash us to pieces if we’re not fresh enough, insightful enough, inspired enough and just downright smart enough. Granted, the pressure might be self-induced but we still need to search hard for the magic. We need to go where no one else does. It means we have to swim to the deepest end of our imaginations to find the whale shark of an idea or the most perfect word that would have escaped even the famous Roget.

Sometimes, to keep safe from the wrecking ball, we need the sensitivity, the familiarity of routine and the mystical quality of ritual. Brain Pickings website creator Maria Popova says: “While routine aims to make the chaos of everyday life more containable and controllable, ritual aims to imbue the mundane with an element of the magical.”

To define creative people as wholly sensitive would be to pin us down in a finite space or a storage box — a sure way to send a creative soul to its death. (Did I mention that creative people are also dramatic?) We need to be malleable and raw; we need to wear our skins inside out in order to let the wild and wonderful ideas stick. But we also need to be thick-skinned and resilient to survive criticism, to offer critique and move on.

We approach our search for ideas in a childlike manner and often the nuggets land in moments of complete frivolity. But there is also a mature sophistication employed by creatives in the articulation and execution of our ideas. We can appear to cruise towards a deadline with schoolboy casualness but we know we have absolutely no intention of missing it. We require detailed information but not so detailed that we get squashed between the pages of company annual reports. We need positive affirmations and reinforcement but not to the point where we stop believing it.

We can craft a piece of art direction for 13 hours solid but we can also troll through mindless internet fodder for hours. In short, the contradictions, the layers and the oddities make up the DNA of a creative being. Sensitivity is a necessary strain but not the only one.

It’s understandable why this description of creative people would initiate a collective rolling of the eyes of account directors. We appear to be high maintenance, needy, temperamental lunatics. It’s tempting to place Tara Hospital on speed dial but the truth is there is a degree of madness and mystery required in any meaningful creative pursuit. And often definitions and labels belie the creative character. A blowfish is, no doubt, a very strange fish. But I’m sure my creative counterparts would agree — we’d take blowfish over krill any day.

Gordhan is a creative director in advertising.