On Haiku and Creative Briefs

I dabbled with writing Haiku a few years ago. Wrote some and gave up. But I stumbled upon this interesting article that explains the essence of Haiku.

You can click here to check it out if you’re interested. There’s also this tool I’d found for writing Haiku.

But from the article, what I like is how George Swede’s concise rules touch upon the soul of the matter.

In the Global Haiku intro, [Swede] outlines eight commonly used haiku guidelines, then eliminates a few to come up with his five ultimate rules of good haiku.

1. haiku must be brief: one breath long
2. haiku must express a sense of awe or insight
3. haiku must involve some aspect of nature other than human nature
4. haiku must possess sense images, not generalizations
5. haiku must present an event as happening presently, not past or future

The words are fascinating and this tempts me to draw a parallel between Haiku and creative briefs.

The equivalent would probably look something like this:

1. A brief must convey a single mission to take on
2. A brief must reveal and surprise to kickstart ideas
3. A brief must explore unusual human truths
4. A brief must stimulate without losing specificity
5. A brief must be based in the real world (and be less hypothetical)

Now, we’ve been doing it for quite a long time.

How worse or well that’s another question.