(Part Two of An Irregular Series)
Mariah Carey's Shoe Closet (Really)
When you’re stuck for an idea, call up a friend and talk about the general topic for 4 or 5 minutes.
You’ve got to write a spot for a shoe store, and you’re stuck for an idea. Call a friend who buys lots of shoes and say, “Tell me about buying shoes.”
“Huh?”
“Why do you buy so many shoes? How do you decide which stores to buy shoes from? What’s your earliest memory of buying shoes?”
Ask anything that comes to mind — not trying to write a commercial, just making conversation. And when they say something that suddenly triggers an idea in your head, you immediately say, “Well, gotta go!”
Half of My Shoe Wardrobe, Caught In A Tornado
For 15 years I wrote a radio comedy service, and my friends always knew when I was on deadline and stuck for ideas…because that’s when I’d call them up. “Hey, how’s it going?”
We’d starting chatting about this and that, bantering back & forth, and as soon as I ad libbed something funny that I could use in my comedy service, I’d end the conversation. “Talk to you next month….”
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A writer (whose name I can not recall) once told me, “There’s no such thing as writer’s block. If you can’t work on your book/article/whatever, then at least write something, a letter, anything…”
It is comforting to know that true professionals also, on occasion, suffer from ‘writer’s block.’ And it isn’t a fatal disease. You develop a strategy to work around it. Just write something to get the ideas in your head outside on a page (or screen as the case may be) and then you will have something to grapple with. What you write first may never see the light of day in production but it will ‘lead’ you to something that may work.
Did a comic strip for three years in R&R, as you remember, Dan-O, and talk about moments of trembling and fear that nothing funny was ever again going to arrive at my drawing board!
I like what U2’s Bono said about this… He once said that it’s so important to be honest in writing lyrics for a song that more than once, he’s has a melody and has literally started off the song with a line like “I can’t think of anything to write…” Of course, he always “came around” before the band stepped in the studio…