Full text of author Brad Herzog’s talk: A writer’s secrets to catching creative ideas at TEDxMonterey conference. In this personal talk, the award-winning freelance writer shares some of his favorite stories and best kept secrets for pursuing and catching great ideas.
Notable quote from this talk:
“I wonder about everything, even the most mundane things.”
Listen to the MP3 Audio here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Brad Herzog – Author
This is me: 1978 summer camp, Northern Wisconsin. I had a full head of hair. I had Buddy Holly glasses and I swear to you at the other end of that fishing line, I had a huge fish.
Unfortunately, there’s no photo to prove it. Nobody thought of taking a picture of the TAM fish. But that’s okay. Use your imagination. Think of all the possibilities at the other end of that line. And that’s essentially what I’m going to talk about today is creative possibilities.
As a writer, as the author of more than 30 books and scores of magazine articles, and I’ve been a freelance writer for more than two decades, I’m often asked about the writing process: Where do you write? When do you write? How do you write? Valid questions.
But that ignores half the battle when you’re trying to craft a literary masterpiece. And that is simply this: What the heck are you going to write about?
Good writing begins with a great idea, an idea so compelling that an editor or publisher can’t pass it up, an idea so compelling that a reader can’t pass it by. If you’re leafing through a magazine, you’re not stopping on a story because of the writing really, you’re stopping because of the idea, the subject matter.
It’s my job to catch those ideas when they come to me wherever they come from and turn them into something delicious. So I thought, that basically describes many of the roles that we play in our professional lives too, by the way, that we’re often tasked with coming up with a unique way of looking at things.
So I thought before I take you on a little fishing expedition of my creative process, my stories through the years, in the hope that it would offer some insight into the spectrum of possibilities out there. So I’ll start this way.
Who remembers the movie Cast Away, starring Tom Hanks? Good movie, right. Great movie. You know, who wrote that movie? It wasn’t me; I have no idea. I have no idea who wrote that movie?
But it’s a great movie, and Tom Hanks is on a FedEx plane; it crashes into an ocean. He’s stranded on a deserted island; he’s trying to figure out a way to eat and survive. And eventually FedEx boxes start washing ashore, and finally starts opening some of them; he takes way too long; could have been a Swiss Army Knife and a satellite phone in one of them.
But finally, he starts opening, and he opens one and he pulls out a dress. And it’s made out of leather and a sort of mesh material at the bottom, and you’re thinking, well that’s useless.
But in the very next scene, you see that he’s taken that mesh material, and he’s created a fishing net out of it and he’s caught some fish, and he can eat for the first time on the island.
Basically what he did was he turned… he took the mundane and he turned it into the miraculous. And that’s often what I try to do.
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Everything in my daily existence, my mundane daily existence, can be fodder for a clever and creative idea. It’s just a matter of sort of tilting my head at the world a little bit, questioning everything, and what I like to call wondering out loud. I wonder about everything, even the most mundane things.
How many times have we tied our shoes in our lifetime? Ten thousand times, 20,000 times. One day I was tying my shoe and I looked down and I wondered: who designed the Nike swoosh? It’s one of the most iconic recognized logos in the world; somebody came up with it.
So I looked into it and I wrote about a woman named Carolyn Davidson who was a graphic design student in Oregon in 1971. And Phil Knight approached her and asked her to come up with something, and she came up with that. You know, how much she was paid for that? $35! Yeah. She later got stock options; she’s fine going.
But that came from me time I sure one day. A short while after that I was wandering the grocery aisles. And I was… somehow I ended up in the baby food aisle. Actually I know why? I had babies and I looked and I wondered who is the Gerber baby? That adorable drawing has been on the jar of Gerber baby food since 1928.
Somebody posed for that drawing, and there have been rumors throughout the years: is it Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, Bob Dole? It turns out it’s a woman named Ann Turner Cook who is now an 87 year-old self-published mystery writer in Tampa, Florida. She’ll always be the world’s most famous baby.
So what I did was I combined those two ideas, and I wrote a magazine article about the origins of some of our most iconic advertising images through the years: The Michelin Man; The Morton Salt Girl; the NBC Peacock, that sort of thing. And it all started with me tying my shoe and wandering the grocery aisles.
So anything can be fodder for an idea. Even more mundane things like that, even like eating, I was once tasked with writing a book from an educational publisher, writing a book for fifth graders. And the assignment was: make it 120 pages long and make it funny. That was the assignment. That’s not easy; 120 pages was about 24,000 words. 24,000 words of funny is not easy.
I was panicking. I could not think of an idea.
I was wandering around my house thinking: what’s funny, what’s funny? And then I wandered into my kitchen, I opened the fridge, got something to eat, closed the fridge. Now when you open the refrigerator, the light turns on in the fridge. When you close it the light turns off.
That came an idea. I wrote a book called Freddy in the Fridge, about a little 8-inch man who lives in the refrigerator, sleeps on the cottage cheese. And his only job is to turn the light on and off every time we close it. Pretty smart, right? He gets out of the fridge, he falls, get to school, he creates all kinds of trouble. It’s a pretty funny book. But how did I get that idea? I was hungry. That’s how that idea came to me.
So they can come from anywhere, and wondering out loud is a great way to go about it.
This might serve as a great visual metaphor for the creative process. Often we’re all sort of fishing in the same spot. It might be a good spot, it might be a popular spot. I’m a writer. What’s popular these days? Wizards and vampires, right? It just makes me not want to write about wizards and vampires.
I’d rather drop my line somewhere else, find my own little fishing hole. It’s a lot easier to get attention that way. It’s not easier to be unique that way.
So I’d like to… one way I love to do that is by countering conventional wisdom. Surprise people! Make them expect the unexpected sort of.
And there’s lots of ways to go about doing that. One way I did this: I once wrote a magazine article about some of the most famous misquotes in history. By that I mean, for example, in none of the 44 stories that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about Sherlock Holmes, did his detective ever actually say, “elementary, my dear Watson”? Not once. He said elementary, he said my dear Watson; he never put the two together. That came later in the movies. Never said it.
James Cagney; in none of his films, did he ever actually say “you dirty, rat”? He came close; he said worse things, but he never said you dirty rat.
Captain Kirk; in none of the original 79 Star Trek episodes, did he ever actually say the four words: “Beam me up Scotty.” That would be his epitaph; he never actually said it.
So if I could surprise people, if I could make them rethink things, that’s a great… that’s a great way to go about things.
My favorite example of that is I once wrote a magazine article about an old college professor of mine who did… he’s a psychology professor… and he did a study about Olympic medalists. And he basically examined their reaction, like, immediately after their event, when they found out the results and then on the medal stand.
And he came to the conclusion that on the whole, bronze medalists are actually more satisfied than silver medalists. It depends who you compare yourself to. It actually comes from an old Jerry Seinfeld bit. I wish I could imitate his voice; I can’t, but I’ll do the bit. he basically said, “You know if you win the gold medal, you’re happy. If you win the bronze medal you’re thinking well at least I got something. If you win the silver medal, it’s sort of like well congratulations, you almost won, right? Out of all the losers you’re the number one loser.”
Now that’s funny, but there’s a profundity to that, too. It makes you rethink things. And if I could make the reader rethink things, that’s a victory for my idea. And it’s a great hook for an idea.
All right, speaking of hooks, let’s go back to fishing. This is my dad. That’s where I got my eyesight. His name is actually Bud. When my dad and I were fishing on… at that summer camp in Lake Nebagamon, Wisconsin, he would always tell me that when you get the first little nibble at the end of your fishing rod, don’t jerk your fishing rod right away, you’ll lose the fish. You wait for that second stronger nibble. You wait for that third really strong bite, and then you hook the fish and you reel it in.
The analogy for what I do would be: don’t jump the gun on your idea; let it percolate a little bit. Think about it for a while and essentially find the real story.
I was once reading the fine print of a sports encyclopedia. And by the way the fine print is where I get some of my best ideas. Everyone else ignores it. I was once reading an Atlas and I looked at the tiniest little dots on the map and I realized they started to have… that a lot of them had names like Harmony, California; Wisdom, Montana, Pride, Alabama; Justice, West Virginia; Inspiration, Arizona; that turned into a whole 400-page travel memoir that I wrote about searching for virtue in America in those places, started with an Atlas.
So the fine print is my friend. But I was reading the fine print of encyclopedia and I noticed a list of intercollegiate tennis champions through the years. I noticed that the 1892 tennis champ was a guy named Bill Larned, this guy right here. And he was a student at Cornell University. I happen to be a Cornell University graduate and I’ve written for the alumni magazine for about 20 years now.
So I thought, okay, we don’t have very many athletic champions at Cornell. That’s a great nice little sports story for Cornell. But then I looked into it further, and I discovered that after he graduated, Bill Larned won seven national titles which is a record. And over the course of 20 years, he was ranked in the top 10, 19 times; that’s a remarkable record of longevity.
So I thought okay, I didn’t realize he’s actually a Hall of Fame tennis player, so it’s a bigger sports story. But I still thought it was basically a sports story.
But then I wondered what’s the real story, and it turns out I wondered what happened that one year that he wasn’t ranked in the top ten? It was 1898, right in the middle of his career. What happened that year?
Well, it turns out that 1898 was the year of the Spanish-American war and Bill Larned was one of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. That feeling that you’re having right now is the feeling that I get when I realized that’s the real story. So I wrote about that. It wasn’t a story about a tennis player; it was a story about a guy who was part of a crew… a motley crew of Ivy League athletes and outlaws who rushed San Juan Hill with a future president during the Spanish-American war. That was the story.
The line about him being the tennis champion in 1892 was one line of the story. I found the real story. So often it takes a little bit of patience; that’s part of the creative process. And obviously patience is a big part of the fishing process as well.
In fact, I’m reminded of a great line by another comedian Steven Wright; he said there’s a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore like an idiot.
But it’s all about patience, right? So patience is a virtue and it could be part of the creative process. And sometimes that means not only finding the idea but waiting and figuring out how to convey the idea. I love… I like to fish, I love golf, and I found out something that I thought was pretty funny several years ago.
Believe it or not there are actually professional miniature golfers. It’s not their full-time job but they travel the different tournaments around the country and they can win as much as three or five grand for winning a miniature golf tournament. Now before you decide I’ll switch careers, they’re really good, they usually get a hole-in-one, the worst they ever get is a two.
But I thought that was pretty funny professional miniature golfer, so I thought it’d be a nice magazine article. But I didn’t feel like I had the right angle. That’s what I’m… you have to find the right angle. I needed the right way to tell the story.
Then I found out that there’s an event that takes place every September called the Masters of Miniature Golf. It’s the national championship of miniature golf. The best miniature golfers from all over the world converge in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina and compete for this tournament.
I thought, okay, that’s a good framework for the story, a better way for me to tell the story. But I still didn’t think I had the right angle, the right attitude for the story.
So then I thought well what if I actually compete in a tournament, what if I try to win the Masters of Miniature Golf? And what if I write about that sort of my Walter Mitty account of competing in the Masters of Miniature Golf, and I write about it.
So I went to Myrtle Beach and I entered the tournament. There were 31 people in the tournament; twenty-eight of them were essentially professional miniature golfers, really good. Two of them were a couple of grandparents on vacation in Myrtle Beach who entered the tournament. And one was myself.
I’m not bad at golf. I actually got a hole-in-one on my first two holes and I started thinking I’m going to win this thing. Forget the story; I’m going to win this thing.
Well, it turns out that after 72 holes, out of the 31 golfers I finished 31st. I finished the last. But the grandparents beat me. They’re better than they looked.
Now, was that bad? Well, it was a little embarrassing. I really did try to win, but it was one of the best stories I’ve ever written was about how I finished in last place in the national championship of miniature golf. Rule 1a of writing is: show, don’t tell. And instead of telling the reader how intense this competition was and how good these golfers were, I showed the reader in a funny way all about that by showing how bad I was compared to them. It’s a much better way to tell the story.
So when you’re creating an idea, there are different aspects to it. There’s conceiving the idea; there is developing the idea; and there’s conveying the idea. And if you can put that all together, sometimes you can catch something really special. Sometimes you don’t. Sometimes all you catch is something like that.
But that’s okay, because always, always the act of pursuing creativity is a triumphant act.
So I want to leave you with a quote from Henry David Thoreau who knew his way around a pond. He said everyone should believe in something. I believe I’ll go fishing.
