In my constellation of obsessive-compulsive behavior, checking was a pain in the ass — rattling doorknobs to be sure they were locked, touching the stove ten times before leaving on a trip. Another star in my galaxy was collecting. I became an obsessive stockpiler of ideas.
Advertising is a dragon sitting across your desk with an insatiable appetite for ideas. I spent a lot of years as a copywriter feeding that bottomless gullet. The diet is finicky, a smooshing-together of clever words, popular culture, human insights, hard data and client demands into a casserole that sells things. (As legendary adman David Ogilvy put it, “We sell, or else.”) I began to record ingredients to go into the mix. At the movies, I’d note directors, actors, title designers and cinematographers that I could consider for television commercials. I’d pull stories from magazines (this was pre-Internet) that mentioned rising stars. I’d glean artists from museums and galleries. I’d clip The New Yorker for events and reviews, and scan three newspapers daily for talent. I kept my geek badge handy, a little spiral notebook in a shirt pocket.
The mind-spinning was exhausting at times, all-consuming, but two things happened. I could go home and remember, in detail, where I’d been and what I’d seen that day. I could look back years later and tell you that on October 12, 2009, I’d been at the Frankfurt Museum fur Moderne Kunst, mesmerized by On Kawara’s “Date Paintings,” a body of work consisting of nearly 3,000 paintings of a date, on a panel. (You win, Mr. Kawara.)
Collecting, or notetaking, was rigorous and compulsive but it forced me to deeply note events as I lived them, to parse a movie into its scenes, music and crew, to look at paintings not just for beauty but for their components and stories.
Cezanne painted “The Card Players” in Aix in the south of France. He painted five versions in his family’s farmhouse, art-directed to look differently each time by swapping out people, props and backgrounds. It’s the same picture, only different. Does this matter? I didn’t know then and don’t know now. My craziness wasn’t guided by discernment. The idea was just to gather it all up, which I did by noting three versions of this painting while standing in the Met in New York, the d’Orsay in Paris and the Barnes in Philadelphia.
I’m fascinating at cocktail parties, until you have to walk away bewildered by all this shit.
The difference between collecting ideas and checking doors is utility. I found justification as a collector when I worked at Fox Television in Hollywood. A “Development Director” worked in the office across from mine. I quizzed her about the mountain of books and magazines piled around her. They were her job! She had a big scrapbook in which she’d paste clippings of movie reviews, pictures of hopeful stars, stories about local theatre productions, squibs from Variety or the Hollywood Reporter. She was a scanner of culture, an idea radar for the big dogs to consult when they went searching for pilots or shows. She’d drag the books to monthly meetings and tell the bosses what was cool, who was worth bringing in for a chat, who was beautiful, talented or funny. What I did out of obsession was a real job for her, at least as real as anything in Hollywood can be.
I get hoarders, and can’t look away from the television series. I shared a sliver of their desire, except my accumulation wasn’t to create some emotional anchor to a house. (There’s good stuff in there!) With my notebooks and scraps of paper, I built a vault of ideas, a hoard of riches that nobody else had. My cache bulged with voices, actors, beginnings of ideas, anecdotes, musicians, characters, locations — all manner of ephemera that made no sense and had no obvious or immediate use. But, my collection was insurance from the terror all creative people share: running out of ideas. I was quietly gathering up a trove of acorns against some imagined creative winter.
Checking held me back, jostling doorknobs and fiddling with the oven had negative value. But collecting built a vault of ideas I could unleash at will; my scraps let me be first and fastest when the call went out for new ads and pitches.
At the time, there was a custom in advertising to convene a painful ceremony called a “creative shootout.” Many agencies employed this wicked gauntlet that pitted creative people against each other in a showdown of ideas, presented to the creative director, whose judgement ruled which work went to the client. The intrigue was mighty, with teams spying on each other to ferret out what ideas opponents might show, while everyone tried to mindread the creative director — “She likes celebs being funny,” or “He hates people singing.” On the appointed day, we’d trudge to a conference room and spend hours presenting our wares, each prefaced with longwinded setups. Getting to the table was a huge panic for everyone but me, the crazy gatherer with the secret stash of ideas.
While driving to work one morning, I heard a guy on NPR reading a funny monologue about why socks get lost in the dryer. I parked my car in the garage, checked the doors twice to make sure they were locked, walked away, walked back, did it all over again, then turned around to look at the car one more time, confirming it hadn’t been teleported into space. Finally, I rode the elevator up and wrote Tom Bodett’s name down. He was a carpenter in Homer, Alaska, who read radio essays on the side.
Tom was terrific and his voice magical, but there was no place for him besides my idea file. We stayed in touch for the next couple of years. He built houses, I wrote ads. Then, like a lightning bolt, the agency landed Motel 6, the original budget lodging establishment. (Okay, America’s cheapest motel chain.) I knew exactly the campaign they needed because I’d had the idea years before and it was sitting in my vault. I called Tom, and the “We’ll Leave the Light on for You” campaign for Motel 6 lifted off. It was named one of Ad Age’s top campaigns of the century, has won hundreds of awards and is included in the Clio’s Advertising Hall of Fame. I leveraged the hit into a job with an agency in San Francisco. The campaign ran for another 38 years, comprising more than a thousand commercials and a dozen writers. It’s the longest running campaign in radio history.
I spent years collecting ideas, building the haystack. Buried deep inside was the needle that launched my career. In madness, I found a life-changing superpower.
I’ve given up little notebooks, and now use Apple Notes. I’m still building the vault, but for stories, not commercials. Creative shootouts have been replaced by submission calls. I still fret about the house burning down, but I don’t worry about rejections or running out of ideas. I’ll forever be collecting both, like crazy.
David Fowler has stories in The Threepenny Review, North American Review, River Teeth, Pithead Chapel and West Trade Review. He’s legally blind and writes at a syrupy pace in Jackson, Mississippi, after living in New York and on a ranch in Texas.
