White Bulls & Grey Ghosts – copywriting and the battles we have with the page
Were it not for the start and the end, copywriting would be a breeze. Like a Polo mint, copywriting is one of those tasks where the middle is the part we chomp through most easily.
Beginning anything – from complicated surgery, to a 100-yard dash, to writing the label for a craft beer called ‘Collymore’s Ennui’ – leaves a dull ache in the mind, fingers and groin.
Hemingway – in between shooting things, getting hammered and writing the 20th century’s most muscularly graceful prose – shared our pain. No doubt you have heard of ‘The White Bull’, Hemingway’s typically craggy metaphor for the blank page.
Whatever approach you would take to tackling a bull of any hue (I’d personally throw my anorak at it and run like a teenage shoplifter), the metaphor is a fair representation of something many of us encounter on a daily basis.
In the worst cases, the blank page can not only appear empty of thoughts, but be an active repellent to them. Imagination can be difficult when one is faced with a gleaming testament to its absence thus far.
Likewise, if a page of empty nothingness can be impossibly intimidating, a page filled with a different kind of nothing can deflate you entirely.
This different species of ‘the void’ is a page filled with words, lines and thoughts that, on reflection, contains precisely nothing of value. Though scribbled so densely it is more pencil than paper, quite often that page is just a less pristine version of your original stupor.
These pages are what I call ‘Grey Ghosts’ (clumsy writing metaphors are not strictly the preserve of Nobel Prize winning rum-fiends). These ghosts are the swirling apparitions of pencil marks we leave all across a page, before we realise that not one of them contains a breath of creative life.
These are the obvious answers, the tired formulas, the well-worn pair of inky slacks. And whether you find yourself frozen and weeping before the bull or the ghosts, you are still an impossible distance from an idea.
But copywriting, it must be remembered, isn’t always quite as gloomy as this. Nor are the moments of gloom irrevocable.
However excruciating the battle with a blank page – or a page filled with your own hackery may be – both can be sidestepped with patience, calm and process.
Like a beat-em-up computer game, copywriting your way out of a dark pit is a matter of fighting one mallet-knuckled boss at a time.
And, oddly enough, your greatest allies for tackling the White Bull are those spectral stranglers of creativity, the Grey Ghosts.
If you find yourself drowning in the white, empty menace of the page, then the simplest thing to do is fill it. (This isn’t quite as flippant as it seems.)
By filling the page with every lazy, obvious, derivative thought that comes to mind you will succeed in not only banishing the bull, you’ll also empty your mind of all the hackneyed ideas that are blocking your inspiration.
This act of alphabetical purge does not mean that a magnificent new idea will always be found behind this bung of banality. But it at least helps to quickly switch your mind between states of impotence, imitation and finally invention.
Then all you have to do is find a compelling way to end it. Which, if you can be bothered to do it properly, is just as tricky. The end.