Creativity Squared: Maggie Williams on Why Humour Is the Best Approach, Even When You’re Not Trying to Be Funny

Maggie Williams is a Minneapolis-based writer at advertising and branding agency MONO, where she comes up with big ideas, writes TV spots, pitches new business, and has fun doing it. Maggie has created award-winning work for clients like Sunoco, Président Cheese, Best Buy, Adyen, Sam's Club, and Bumble. When she’s not writing or running, Maggie, her partner, and their dog watch TV for at least five hours a day and are collectively developing a podcast to justify the time spent. 

Person

I’m part satirist and part clown, all optimist. I observe the quirks and nuances of human thought, speech, and behaviour, then bring them out in my work in exaggerated ways that surprise and delight. For better or worse, humour is my default mode of creative expression. That doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going for a big, loud laugh every time. Usually, that’s not called for. But even the most honest, heartfelt, dramatic stories a person can tell must have moments of lightness to feel authentic. I love drama, melodrama, and camp, wherever I can get it! But there’s nothing worse than a plodding, self-serious tragedy, especially in advertising. I find such rich fodder in the most banal parts of human existence. Tiny beats. Small mishaps. Relatable things. Like when you see someone do something unintentionally funny, then look around the room to see if anyone else noticed too. I want to be that person you can share the acknowledgment with that, yes, that was indeed as funny as you thought. My very, very best work always has exquisite silliness. Our world is a lot of things, but it’s so funny if your eyes are open to it. 

Product

It depends on whether I’m judging myself or others. If it’s mine, I can feel it in my bones. I go to bed feeling proud of myself and the people I made it with. It’s a little bit of a romantic spark, almost. I want to revisit it as soon as I wake up. For others, my best metric for this is whether I’m jealous that I didn’t think of it first. I want to be the only person in the world having original ideas. But in all seriousness, I am not the toughest arbiter of creativity when judging work I just stumble upon out in the world. Don’t get me wrong, there’s some incredible stuff out there and some ghastly stuff, but most of it falls somewhere in the middle and was made by people like me. So my favourite exercise, and maybe this is being too generous (though I’d say that’s impossible), is to give everything as much benefit of the doubt as I can and try to imagine what the original creative might have been like before the account team, the agency leadership, the client, the client’s legal team, and the client’s neighbour all got their hands on it. 

Process

I’m so envious of those who can see a roadmap in their mind before they ever put words down on the page—the disciplined ones. The people who have the idea then start crafting the vision. That is not me, baby. By and large, I write my way into the idea. That goes for my work in advertising and even more so for my personal projects. I do not know what I’m doing ahead of time. At the beginning of the conception process, I’m like a sculptor with lots of clay and no plan. I just start creating shapes, doing what feels good and right, until one destination makes sense for each lump of clay. If one of my sculptures has a piece that I particularly cherish but isn’t quite working, I’ll take it off and stick it on other sculptures to see if it looks better elsewhere. My process is inefficient, so I end up with many leftover pieces like this. I’ve learned the hard way not to try and reverse engineer the work to fit one beloved piece, so I have a junkyard of concepts, headlines, and visual metaphors that I created, fell in love with, and then abandoned. I hope that all of them will one day get their time to shine. 

Press

Well, praise is my jet fuel. At its core, this is a business of pleasing others. I’m a Leo, and I want recognition. I do my best work when my creative director gases me up, which he’s happy to do. Maybe this is uncool, but I love awards; they are symbols of high praise and feel so nice in the hands. I hope as long as it’s financially feasible, award shows will keep using genuine heavy metals and stones to give them the proper heft. 

I’ll also say this: I discovered my creative voice and style by writing plays. I went to college for theatre, and I was 19 the first time I bore witness to actors giving my words life, more life than I ever could have given them myself. It’s a gift and made me want to write scripts, in some fashion, forever. As many ways as there are for creative ideas to get watered down with more collaborators (and my god, we delicate writers love to lament this fact), there is just as much opportunity for the work to improve. In fact, I’ll go as far as to write that you need to work with others to reach your full potential. I may have a cool line reading in my head for one of my scripts, but when working with a great director and talented actors, there are always pleasant surprises in store. And I’m always the most easily impressed person in the room. “They’re saying the thing I wrote!” That’s a bit more ego right there, I guess.