Robert Ausura Writing

     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 a 7-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.