The creative cannot be simplified

Refusing to be distilled

Clarity and simplicity are not the same thing.

There, I said it. I’ve been sitting with this one like salt on my tongue... rolling it around, feeling blood bloom under grit.

Most of the marketing advice out there tells you to simplify yourself to death when writing about your business. Find your one-liner! Flatten your whole, complicated, brilliant, creative self down into something that feels like a limp handshake instead of a shaken collar.

I don’t know about you, but I want to connect with people who contain multitudes. Who FASCINATE ME. People who have 27.3 interests on the go at any one time, and also have one clear, singing, resonant thread running through everything they do.

I do not want someone who has been reduced to one single, templated sentence to articulate the full colour spectrum of who they are.

• The days of “I help X person do Y resulting in Zzzzzz” (deathly boring) is dead.

• Clarity and complexity can live in harmony.

• Your voice can be clear as hand cut glass while spilling out the million stories that make you who you are.

You can achieve clarity and still be multifaceted, irreverent, and vivid as all hell. Your personality is the clarity. The way you express yourself is the clarity. Your complexity is the clarity.

My ideal client is a grown woman with an exquisite, swirling inner world. She is not reflected in simplicity. Neither are you.

And recently, I’ve noticed a small collective of creatives I admire questioning this too - this conflation of simplicity and clarity. Questioning whether this relentless being told to simplify ourselves was ever really about being clear, or was in fact, just about keeping us small? Package-able. Machine-readable.

After all, do we not seek out the people who fascinate us? Who show us something new? Who think and speak in entirely new ways? The rules of fiction and poetry do not have to be entirely dashed in the sphere of marketing. In fact, if anything, I’d say they’re what will connect many creative business owners with their ideal clients way more effectively than any old, tired-ass, simple, sodden as a cardboard box one-liner.

They got it all twisted.

So next time you’re about to edit yourself down - ask yourself: is this clearer, or just simpler (and therefore smaller)?

You are a crystal refracting light: fuck ‘em - let every colour shine.

Becs

Join Thrash: the after party for jaded creatives. Where we figure out how to build a creative business & still live a creative life. All over a can of warm cider.

And if any of this stirred something in you - my Wild Writer Sessions might be your next move.

They’re live generative writing sessions where you turn up, get creative tools + business prompts, and write alongside other creative business owners for 90 mins - no editing yourself down, no distilling, no aiming for simple ;) You leave with 2-4 pieces that are unmistakably, wildly you.

DM me to join the waitlist for the next one.