The Ghost of Creative Future
Hellhounds and hacks
Robert Johnson, king of the Delta blues (and maybe all the blues), once sang:
“And the days keeps on worryin' me.
There's a hellhound on my trail.”
Regarding hellhounds, a not-vetted, not-that-reliable, anonymous contributor at Genius.com—a lyrics site that is fun if not terribly accurate or moderated all that well—postulates, “The hellhound is a creature of mythology that was said to be a bearer of death when sighted three times. It resembles a big, black dog that scorched the earth where it stepped and possessed phantom-like qualities. According to Greek mythology, the hellhound was the watchdog to the underworld. It was called Cerberus and had three heads and a snake for a tail1.”
The earth-scorching hellhound on my trail is not a black dog. It’s no three-headed watchdog either.
It’s just…a guy.
He seems like he’s 100 years older than me. But every day, he’s a little less 100 years older than me. He’s probably got a little facial hair and a shirt that used to be cool. Maybe some shoes that still are.
He’s the obsolete creative. I’ve worked with this guy a few times, actually. Or versions of him. I call him the Ghost of Creativity Future and he scares the dickens2 out of me. He haunts me all the time. He doesn’t have any good ideas. He recycles his old ideas regularly, hoping nobody notices. And maybe worst of all, he might as well be saying—in the words of songwriter Randy Newman— “I’m dead but I don’t know it.”3 Nobody believes in his creativity anymore. Not even himself.
Of course, the creative field is notorious for chewing you up and spitting you out. For burning out the young and leaving the old in the ashes. So it’s not entirely this guy’s fault. An occupational hazard.
Early in my career, on a late Friday night, long after an ultra-virile single dude4 in his mid- 20s like me should be out on the town, I was stuck in a little office, face to face with one of my creative directors, the Ghost of Creativity Future. To his credit, he was spending his Friday night with a junior copywriter, trying to help “punch up” some tv spots that our client had approved. We were trying to make them funnier. Better. We were wracking our brains, throwing out puns and physical gags and setups and payoffs, but mostly coming up empty. And I knew, when he said just four words, that we were never going to make the spots funnier, that our Friday night would be wasted, and that we would both go home that night just as unfunny as when we started.
The four words were: “what would Raymond do?”
He was referring to the then-popular (populist?) tv sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond and its titular character Raymond who, in my creative director’s mind, was the gold standard for laughs. By that point, the show had long since comedically peaked and was, in my virile5 mid-20s mind, the definition of milquetoast, middle-of-the-road, laugh-track-dependent comedy. We were sunk. I knew it6. The problem was: the Ghost of Creativity Future, sitting across from me in my creative director’s clothing and rummaging through his brain for some Ray Romano one-liner, was dead and didn’t know it.
I harbor a persistent, vain fear—as much in my day job as a creative director as when I’m writing songs or essays or whatever—that I’ve run out of ideas. That my creative well is dry. That I’m just recycling the “hits" or coloring-by-number. That I’m washed up7 and have landed smack dab in the middle of my Ghost of Creativity Future stage.
Most creatives, whether they’ll admit it or not, transition to more managerial, executive roles to avoid having to confront their creative mortality.8 If you can schedule enough 1-on-1s and brainstorm lunches and management retreats, then maybe you can avoid the ice-cold fact that you're a hack. There’s no greater insult in the world of (corporate) creativity than “hack.”9 Someone can be a slimeball or a jerk, but still have coworkers recognize their creativity (unfortunately there might even be a correlation between the two in a lot of cases). People will put up with a lot of mediocre behavior to get the most of out of a creative person. I’ve seen it firsthand. But nobody will do that for a hack. Once you’re a hack, you’re never going back.
So people sidestep it. Up the ladder. On to the managerial, administrative side. But, man, I still just love ideas. I love being around creativity. There’s nothing quite like staring down the blank slate and filling it with something that didn't previously exist.
So I sit here, on the downward slide of my 40s, desperately trying to keep my creative wits about me, to stay some kind of relevant, to maintain the spark, to feed the fire, to keep just a little space between me and the hellhound on my trail.
I smell his breath. I run a little faster.
I hear his hack-y ideas coming out of my mouth. I try to think of something, anything else.
I try not to look back. The myth says, after all, that the hellhound is a bearer of death if seen three times. So I won’t be looking. Once was enough.
Maybe it’s a matter of time. But he won’t catch me flat-footed, much less with my neck craned backwards10.
Literary pun intended, which shows you just how perilously close to the edge I am.
From my personal favorite Randy Newman album Bad Love. This specific song—not even that great a song, to be honest, compared to the rest of the record, it’s kind of a one-line joke, but it helps articulate what I’m going for here—is about washed-up rockstars trying to milk their fame but mostly just embarrassing themselves. I love these lines:
Everything I write all sounds the same
Each record that I'm making
Is like a record that I've made
Just not as good
Sarcasm font.
SARCASM FONT.
You might say, “Oh, but Paul…why are you absolving yourself from responsibility to make the spots funnier? YOU could have made them funnier even if The Ghost of Creativity Future wasn’t going to.” To which I would reply, “I get what you’re saying and, yes, I must (and do) bear the burden of unfunniness here. But the rest of the truth is: I had been tossing out ideas that I thought were funny only to have them shot down. You can’t really explain funny, I’ve learned. And doing so makes it less so. And when he inadvertently admitted that Raymond was his North Star, I knew we would never agree, never align on ‘funny.’ I’m not saying my ideas were genius or Raymond-level even. I’m just saying that it was futile when our sensibilities had such a chasm between them.” Fair?
And not the good, entertaining washed up, like Tom Cruise in the last Mission Impossible movie, where they emphasized that he’d lost a step but was still out there…going for it…
Interviewing for my second job, I had a guy admit as much to me, saying something akin to, “I remember being creative like you and, sure, I miss it, but I wanted to make more money and it was time to ‘grow up.’”
One of my favorite SNL stories is about the second season, when Chevy Chase had hit it big and was returning to the show to host. Just a year before, he had been a coworker with everybody there, but, upon his return, he was bigtiming everyone and acting like a diva. At some point, it escalated and he got into a shouting match with Bill Murray. As Chevy stormed off the set in a fury, Bill yelled after him, “MEDIUM TALENT!” It was such a precise dart to the heart, like “you’re pretty good, but you’re not great.” Zing.
Feel free to link to all my hack-worthy work in the comments. I can take it.
Pretty sure I know who the Ghost of Creativity Future was. ;)