There is something calming about following a template or using a playbook or filling in the blanks to something you know has been vetted by other folks who have been where you are and (it would seem) have figured things out already. God bless the trailblazers and their good sense to write down how they got there.

Creativity, which can be among the squishiest concepts to grapple with especially when you’re just “not feeling it” today, is an awfully tempting place to seek out one of these instruction manuals. If only it were that simple, right? Step One: Read The War of Art. Step Two: Be creative. ☺️

Well, the great news is that formulas and playbooks and templates and boilerplates do exist! We’ve written about a few of them before. 

And these starting points do help in so many scenarios, not the least of which is overcoming the tyranny of the blank page. 

But like most things, the utility of a fill-in-the-blanks creativity template runs along a spectrum. Sometimes a formula can be great to follow. Other times a formula may make you want to run the other way.

In both cases, the formula gets the job done, though: You end up creating.

Let me explain.

In praise of formulas

If you feel stuck without a Step One for your creative output, you can find a lot of solace in returning to a familiar formula. Creative marketers in particular have a plethora of formulas to fall back on when it comes to creating content. There are: 

• How to build a content strategy, step-by-step

• The 177 best email subject lines and templates 

• Every copywriting formula ever (I’m a frequent user of this one)

• Ultimate list of 30+ headline formulas (I’m guilty of writing this one)

• And the lists go on and on and on

Formulas are shortcuts. (AI is also a good shortcut, but we’ll save that for another post.) The creative life might seem to need wide open spaces and blank slates in order to manifest something never-before-seen, but that utopian setup isn’t for everyone and isn’t always possible. Sometimes, you need to write a newsletter and your newsletter needs a subject line and you’d love a few suggestions of where to get started. (Spoken from experience, obviously, given the subject line of this very newsletter issue.)

Formulas are also tried-and-true. They exist for a reason, much like the outcome of creative marketing’s own survival of the fittest battles, except rather than fish with lungs we have ways to build your creative practice. A fill-in-the-blanks template persists because it has worked in the past, either for you or for your team or for your fellow creators.

Oftentimes, I go searching externally for a playbook, an answer, or an idea. There’s nothing wrong with having a little walkabout for inspiration. But I’m also reminded that I have my own history of creative wins and my own list of workflows that work for me. There’s no shame in finding an Instagram post about someone’s creative process that’s worth copying. But there’s also plenty of truth in us being our own influencers and rediscovering our own sources of get-started magic based on our exceptional past of doing cool things. 

The case against formulas

Templates and playbooks and formulas and fill-in-the-blanks are exceptional fodder for getting unstuck and on the move. 

But they also represent an interesting foil, if you flip them on their head.

How music works

Forgive me in advance for “newslettersplaining” how music works, but I just love this explanation from pianist Chilly Gonzales:

In this video, Gonzales describes how our ears are trained to expect a certain sequence of notes and sounds; we are wired, musically, to fill in the blanks of the songs that we are hearing. 

This templated, formulaic musical expectation of ours leads to some wonderful moments of subversion from some wonderfully talented and very favorite artists. We love the songs we love, unwittingly, because the artists have taken what we expect to hear and found a delightful way to break the mold and go against the grain. It doesn’t have to be completely dissonant to be effective—we’re not talking about a piano melody interrupted by a washing machine interlude, although that type of music is a much-loved genre of its own—rather we’re talking about little moments of surprise that make the most of a known commodity by making it sound just a little bit extraordinary. 

You can probably see how this could translate broadly across a lot of creative expressions. You can take headline formulas and turn them ever-so-slightly around. You could take a creative routine and swap one block for another. It even works in the most tried-and-true of creative formulas: storytelling frameworks.

How to upend a storytelling framework

Writers love to apply storytelling frameworks to the content they’re producing, whether a novelist a blogger or anything in between. The frameworks are popular because they are effective, and they are effective because they speak to a logical way that our brains process information. 

This, of course, can lead to some fun opportunities to shake things up. 

Take the Cinderella story framework, for instance.

The intended flow is this: 

Let’s upend the formula.

What if things start off bad, your protagonist works hard toward a goal, things start to look up, and then … they keep looking up, and more up, and more up, and more up. You will have taken the tension from a familiar and relatable Cinderella situation and shock-and-awed the audience into a one-way rollercoaster ride up, up, up. 

What you are doing when you subvert a popular technique is building tension into the story. People are waiting for things to go back to normal. It is why antihero stories are so appealing and why complicated villains are en vogue. 

(Also, I know the latest Joker movie may disprove my point, but I hope you’ll give me some grace. Yes, they turned an R-rated Joker franchise into a musical—talk about not taking the formulaic approach! But also yes, people DO NOT like it.)

When a business plan is more like a business suggestion

We’ve even seen this “Rage Against the Template” mentality work in a bigger business context. 

Playbooks are so prevalent in the business world, you would think that CEOs invented the term. Everyone wants a playbook, everyone wants to know what everyone else is doing well and how they did it. This of course can lead to some very reassuring advice and solid footing, especially for baby businesses; and it can lead to a homogenized market of similar-looking, similar-sounding commodity businesses who all kind of do similar things in similar ways. 

Some of the businesses that I’m most inspired by are the ones who take the original business script, then decide that they’re actually going to write their own version thankyouverymuch. Mailchimp is a good example of this. They are a bootstrapped software company (NOT how the playbook works). They spend money on billboard ads in Atlanta, Georgia; billboard ads that do not say what Mailchimp does or who Mailchimp is for (NOT how global marketing software companies do things). And yet, it works for them!

We like to think that we’re taking a similar un-formula approach with Bonfire. We think of ourselves a bit like a Trojan horse. Many people know us as a brand and creative agency; our future plans call for us to create a premium online membership for creative folks like me and you and then, before too long, to buy a property—maybe with a castle!—in the French countryside where we will host people and retreats and artists-in-residence. 

Not exactly what you expect to see in your typical business plan slide deck, right? 

A new way of looking at constraints

What is a formula if not a constraint? 

We wrote about the benefit of working with discrete containers and embracing constraints for your creative work. And just as there is power in adhering to a manageable set of instructions, there is also big potential in stretching the bounds of what you’ve been asked or told to do. 

Take social media constraints for instance:

These types of content work in part because they have taken someone’s expectations and surprised and delighted with something you never saw coming. Constraints give creative folks a starting point; and creative folks turn it into a launchpad.

If you’re in need of effective creative work, you can stick to the script (it’s there for a reason!) or you can use the script as inspiration for something slightly askew that will impressively rise above the noise. 

Over to you

What is your appetite for formulas and fill-in-the-blanks? Do you like having something to start from and react to versus going from zero to 60 all on your own? Let us know in the comments or by hitting reply. 

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Say hi anytime.

Kumbaya,Shannon & Kevan