One of the ways my creativity works is in a collaborative manner. Not with another human being, though. Not with another songwriter. Not with a co-writer. Not with a consultant. But with myself.
My conscious and subconscious minds working together.
The metaphor for how this plays out is a relay race. It doesn't actually matter which mind leads off the race, either. It can start with a thought I intentionally cultivated. It can start with a thought that came to me. Either way.
I'm working on a proposal and a pitch for a project and yesterday, I articulated it for the first time to a colleague unintentionally. It piggy backed naturally off another conversation.
Here's the thing, though. I managed to do it on the fly and in such a way that made sense. I hadn't yet taken that pitch out for a spin. I hadn't yet heard it out loud. So I was pleasantly surprised how good it sounded. Plus, it made all kinds of sense to my colleague, lit up some thoughts in their head, too.Ā
Now, the work I've done so far is thinking... and drafting an outline of a proposal in sections. Also trying to draft the pitch in ordered bullet points. Laying out my argument in a note app on my phone. So I had all that swimming freely in my brain.
This was something new, though. The next step of that working it out process that pretty much just launched right out of my mouth. So, once my colleague and I parted ways, I wrote my new pitch down.
You see a few hours before, for an unrelated project, I researched a look I'm trying to craft and one of the articles I ran across laid out a bulleted set of suggestions. A kind of recipe, if you will.
And I have a place for recipes. š
Because this particular set of recipes are the kind I need access to from different locations, geographically separated edit suites, I keep 'em in Google Slides.
Yeah. In the cloud. I can access them from anywhere. Each slide is a recipe. A look. A way of doing a particular thing.
So that was swimming in my head, too.
And right when I went to write down the bullet points of my updated pitch, it occurred to me to put it in Slides.
That's not a completely off the beam idea, by the way. I learned to pitch during my advertising campaigns course in college and we laid it all out with a slide presentation to back us up.
Moving forward, I'm sculpting my pitch through the lens of a slide presentation. After all, if I can't make sense there... I'm simply not making sense.
The conversation with my colleague was a helluva thing, though. Up until that moment I was thinking through the problem, defining the pieces of the puzzle, just starting to arrange then when, on the fly, in the middle of another conversation, my brain rearranged those puzzle pieces into a better arrangement.
So my continuing effort in Slides is me grabbing the baton from my subconscious and running with it just as my subconscious grabbed the baton from my conscious efforts to get my proposal and pitch up and running.
It works that way sometimes, this back 'n forth.
And I absolutely love it when it does.