Art & Creativity Quote by Franklin P. Adams

Adams is puncturing a romantic myth with a newsroom pin: imagination doesn’t make writing faster, it makes writing costlier. The line pretends to complain about inefficiency, but it’s really a brag disguised as a gripe - the classic journalist’s way of signaling craft without sounding precious. If you’re unimaginative, you can dump a serviceable paragraph onto the page in sixty seconds because you’re relying on defaults: stock phrasing, predictable structure, the safe first thought. With imagination, you’re cursed with options. Every sentence becomes a tiny fork in the road: sharper verb or cleaner noun, joke or restraint, texture or speed.

The subtext is that creative labor is mostly invisible labor. The “hour” isn’t spent typing; it’s spent rejecting. Imagination, in Adams’s framing, is less a spark than a relentless internal editor that keeps whispering, “Not that. Not that either.” That voice can look like procrastination from the outside, but it’s actually discernment - the thing that separates copy from style.

Context matters: Adams worked in an early 20th-century media ecosystem that prized brisk turnaround and high output, a world of columns, deadlines, and constant appetite. In that setting, imagination is both the worker’s competitive advantage and their workplace hazard. The joke lands because it admits a truth professionals rarely say out loud: originality is expensive, and the bill comes due in time.