How letting your mind wander every now and again might actually help you run your business

It was one of those days where I knew I had to blog about something but I had no idea what.

Another few paragraphs of tedium about how to do copywriting that’s been written a million times before, along with the obligatory bullet points or ‘5 ways you can do this’ or ‘10 ways you could do this better,’ or ‘20 ways somebody didn’t know they were doing this.’

NO-ONE cares, I don’t care, please stop.

But no! Shut up cynical-part-of-me, lying there in the back of my brain on a deckchair that’s seen better days.

Thing is I know we’re told endlessly that saying whatever it is I just said is wrong, that it doesn’t matter how many times it’s been said before, it’s not so much what you’re saying, but how you say it. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel, but we can reintroduce an idea and make it better through the power of words and thinking creatively.

Yes, we’re all commercial writers, but can we think and write creatively, yes you bet.

In other words someone may come online and discuss the advantages of website copy in such a way you’re going to be wishing you’d written it yourself, and go away punching yourself in the head repeatedly because you’d listened to your doubting Thomas voice and not written it just like you’d said you would...but didn’t….because it had been written about before. Bah humbug.

Uuugggh...whatever.

Thing is, while I’m trying to come up with fascinating titbits about copywriting, and why this is so important, and why that is so essential to this aspect of writing copy, my mind goes somewhere else.

Today, I’ve fixated on a character from Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal, who had to tie the remnants of dead soldier’s caps on to his shoes to keep them on his feet and then dye them black so no one would notice.

And I’m writing a series of ‘guess the bio’ on LinkedIn to promote my new About Page niche, and my first one was Eleanor Marx. And all I’ve done is ask myself how she could have killed herself over a man when she was such a leading light for feminism in her time, and after all the amazing things she did for factory workers and working class women.

And then there’s Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old and there was a soldier juggling with a beer bottle, which he then used as an imaginary guitar and I can’t stop thinking about him and replaying the scene in my head, and the boy who looked no more than 16 and terrified in the left hand corner of the screen at one point in the film. That was someone’s son once.

My mind sticks to different things and stays there for a while like mud, and I kind of like it, it’s going to serve me well at some point I know, but for now it doesn’t feel like it does, and that can be kind of frustrating.

I’m always telling myself that I want to think the same way as everyone else and come up with all sorts of clever things that I can do with copywriting, but there’s so much else I’d like to share with you, (and I know that no matter how much I complain, I love my brain and how it works).

What I can tell you is this -

When I read, my brain cells fire on all cylinders and I know that the extra vocabulary and funny little obsessions  and ideas will be to my advantage at some point. Books are like exercise for my brain. I feel like certain parts of my mind are doing sit ups and abdominal crunches, in readiness for that client job where I had to use my imagination and get my creative juices flowing.

And you know what, there’s a lesson to be learned here.

I’m interested in everything. Be interested in everything, because everything happens for a reason. All the fictitious and non-fictitious characters and the things that happen to them in their lives, live on in my head and help me draft that searing bio or home page.

That mountain of an obstacle someone managed to work their way through will eventually help me illustrate with words the complexities of a person’s business.

That strange little inconsequential thing that happened to someone else will give me an idea several days from now that will help me write what seemed like a difficult paragraph at first glance.

Be interested in everything. Read everything. Come back to what you’re doing with fresh eyes.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a copywriter or a business. Let your mind wander because it’s good for your brain.

Your brain is kind of like a dog, it might wander off ahead, but it’s attached to your lead so it can’t go far, but it might sniff at things, walk on ahead and look around, and generally relax and forget about everything.

Let your brain wander and come back to you in its own good time. You can reel it in, but when you do it’ll have all kinds of tics and thoughts, ideas, obsessions and memories that will help you the next time you’re struggling for an idea or a way in to a story.

Don’t force it. It’ll come of its own accord. And look at me now? I came up with some pearls of wisdom after all.