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I have a favorite organizational exercise that no one but me ever sees.  It's a warmup for a new project, a running start in bare feet, without solid footing in facts, something to get me rolling, to pump me up.  A lot of times, it's not even written.  I just recite it stream-of-consciousness-style onto tape, feeling my way, trying to establish a rhythm, a style, a color palette for the piece.  It's kind of on-the-fly outlining.  I call it drawing a blank.

Let me give you an example.

Today I'm starting work on an 8-minute marketing video.  The service it features is revolutionary: an online shopping mall offering three million items from hundreds of vendors.  There are a bucketfuls of details to include, customer suspicions to overcome, organizational politics to acknowledge.  It has to be bright, energetic, zippy.  It has to convince by inviting the audience in for a spin, making them grab hold, and giving them a good time.

So here I am at 5:45 am on the first day after the Thanksgiving holiday, sitting at my computer, rereading three pages of scrawled meeting notes, scanning a six-page fact sheet with a yellow highlighter, and trying to think bright and zippy.  When all I am is bogged down.  The more I read, the more entangled I get in facts and jargon and the farther away I get from developing a clear, simple, snappy concept.  By 7 am I'm beginning to think that my best hope lies in a third cup of strong coffee.  By 7:30 I know that not even a cup of coffee spiked with a shot of Jack Daniels will help.

So I draw a blank.

I pull on my walking shoes, zip up my jacket, grab my little tape recorder, and go for a walk.  When I come back an hour later, here is what's on the tape:

• Me humming and bah-bah-bumming a funky, tuneless, disjointed jazz riff--complete with mouth percussion--that's really nothing but energy.
• Me pretending to be the client, giving interview bites.
• Me reciting a rambling upbeat VO narration.
• Me as a customer, being hesitant, doubtful, even sarcastic.
• Me as the client again, explaining on camera how the new service solves everything.  Since I don't have much command of the details, it's largely a lot of faking it and exaggerations--anything to keep the flow going.

In between all of these disjointed bits are bursts of visualization, quick descriptions of the movie running in my head: video, graphics, transitional effects, sound effects and music.

A lot of what is on the tape is junk, of course, blind alleys and bad guesses.  But by the time I sit back down at the keyboard, I have a feel for where I'm headed.  Now I can look back over those meeting notes and that fact sheet and make choices about what is important and what isn't, what will fit and what won't.  And I know what research I need to fill in the gaps and make sense of the nonsense.

It's a fun way to work, and in most cases it gets the job done.

I can hear my high school English teachers groaning.    What happened to all the detailed lessons on outlining that they taught me?   I guess I've just drawn a blank.

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