I remember reading a book about copywriting many years ago. At the time, I was an account manager, but I was fascinated by the skills and mindset of professional writers, and so had bought the book looking for some insight. The most important thing that book said was something along the lines of this; writers have a rubbish bag that they carry around with them through life. Into this bag go many things experienced in life-good and bad, interesting and bizarre. Dialogue, feelings, explanations, questions, colours, issues. The bag provides the stimulus needed to create, to think and dream new things. Stimulus leads to connections and when connections are made, creativity is possible.

This point was made again, from another source, when attending the legendary ‘Story’ course in screenwriting, presided over by Robert McKee. He made the point that if you aren’t willing to throw yourself into the torrent of really living and experiencing, you’ll never make a good writer. You need to have lived to show life.

Fresh creativity, the sort that stands out by being starkly different, more imaginative, more challenging to convention, needs fresher connections and therefore better stimulus.

That’s the belief I have. The more diverse and interesting the stimulus, the more engaed the grey matter, the richer the network of connections made to create ‘fresher’ output.

Buy that and you buy into the belief that we should all challenge ourselves to keep more interesting company, do more interesting things, experience more diverse aspects of life.

Agency life is busy enough without spending time in areas that have nothing to do with the core business of advertising/ direct marketing/ digital/ PR etc. etc. Isn’t’ it?

The truth is all of us in the ‘creative industries’ are only useful for the creative thinking we output.

Why should that output receive a confined, narrow set of inputs to make it function?

So the more we experience life in all its eclectic forms, the better and more truly we will be to author fresher creativity.

	What's the connection between these two books?
Whatever you make it.