Creativity > Edition 3 - How we plan a podcast – an example of playing professionally

Hi and welcome to Day 3 of the Cultivating Creativity pop-up newsletter - 31 days of ideas about creativity and then it's gone!

As many of you may know, I’m the co-host of the stationery freaks podcast with Helen Lisowski.

The podcast was a throw away idea a few years back. Something we pondered for a few years and said we’d do one day. Heck, we even recorded a test episode that was pretty bad, but it was a start.

It was a simple idea born out of our belief that good stationery can open up our human potential. It was a project that sounded fun, playful – something to do just for the sake of doing it.

Eventually we played with the idea until it became something we could absolutely see brought to life, something we could sense needed to be created – for our own creative purposes.

It was a fun passion project. Nothing serious. Nothing professional. No obvious end goal. No targets. Just two people with an interest in a topic playing with the idea.

Then we recorded a proper episode, posted it and it lit up.

Our enthusiasm and fun seemed to catch on. We started getting listeners - way more than we ever expected. There were other people interested in this topic. It’s started to grow beyond a playful creative project. There are expectations now!

The challenge is how to keep the play and turn pro at the same time. This is a challenge that often happens when we start creating things.

We need editorial calendars, but we don’t want to stifle our ability to react to what interests us that week. We need schedules, but we don’t want to stifle our flexible approach. We need artwork, social media posts, better web copy and maybe some way of monetising it (as hosting costs aren’t cheap) but without it becoming a burden.

Our recording process is fun and easy. Basic microphones, Zencastr for recording, Dropbox for synching files, Garage Band for editing and Transistor for hosting. The odd Facebook advert and we’re solid.

We don’t need much but should we go pro with any of these things? Many people tell us we should.

We aim for 20-minute episodes but often ramble chat for 30. We keep it playful.

Before we record, we check the stats and are amazed and overjoyed, but there are times when we wonder why an episode didn’t do so well. We keep the conversation loose and bounce off each other through the show - we’ve worked with each other long enough to not need a script. But then we get emails from companies telling us we need scripts and transcripts and this and that. We need to go pro and take it seriously. Maybe we do.

The more listeners we get – the more people want a piece of it, the more we worry the playfulness will go.

Whilst our own creative projects remains fun and playful our creativity is thriving. When it becomes a chore, we need to lean back on other reasons to keep creating it. A playful creative pursuit may not be enough once we have a more demanding audiences, schedules and social media. Of course, some of these constraints are helpful to creativity, but play must remain for creativity to thrive.

And of course, we’re grateful and happy that it’s actually going somewhere! And here in lies an all-too-common dichotomy with creativity. Sometimes the things we create take on a life of their own and the creativity becomes harder to find. It becomes a chore, a job, a demand, a task, an item on the ToDo list – and the play is lost.

We’re not going to let that happen to Stationery Freaks but I’ve seen that happen with my other work.

The sheer playfulness has been lost to the comments, the unsolicited feedback, the negative haters, the people who want to sell me a solution to a problem I didn't even realise I had, the demands for this or that, the opinions (we’ll cover that in a later edition). It can drain the creativity if we’re not careful. It can take the play away and leave an empty chore. And when that happens, we're going to need some compelling "whys" to keep bringing forth our creativity....

2022 for me at least is about rediscovering the play in my blogging, video making, writing, photography and more.

Why?

Because John Cleese is right when he was talking about why adults lose their creativity whilst kids don’t.

“Most adults, by contrast, find it hard to be playful — no doubt because they have to take care of all the responsibilities that come with an adult’s life. Creative adults, however, have not forgotten how to play.”

Whether you are “creating” in work, or your personal life, remember that creativity is playful. It is fun. It is your curiosity brought to life. It is an experiment. It may fail. It may succeed. You will learn something.

And the task, as far as I see it, is to keep the creativity and playfulness for as long as you possibly can.

And maybe there comes a natural time to hand over from creativity to simply getting the job done for other reasons, but I for one, in 2022, am trying to maintain (and rediscover) that playfulness in as many things as I can.

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