such as immersing yourself in the task and allowing time for incubation. “Task Motivation” refers to the drive or will to create: Sternberg’s “decision to be creative.” While all of these factors may not be present in all creators, there is a positive correlation between them and creative success in general. (See the Exercises for applications of these ideas.)
Creativity results from inspiration. We usually think of creativity as the Stage 4 “Aha” or Illumination: the “Eureka! I’ve got it!” of Archimedes in the bathtub. What he got, allegedly, was how to use water displacement in determining whether a gold crown had been adulterated with baser metal.
The British Romantic poets conceived inspiration as a divine wind, coming and going of its own will. In his poem “Dejection” Coleridge, who had an Aeolian harp set in his hallway to catch the drafts, yearns to be set quivering like his harp. In “The Eolian Harp” (1795-1817), Coleridge wonders whether there is a cosmic principle of creativity blowing through all of us like the wind:
. . . what if all of animated nature
Be but organic harps diversely framed,
That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of each, and God of all? (ll. 44-48)
The problem with the “Wind Theory of Creativity” is the same as the problem with wind turbines as a source of alternative energy. The winds don’t always blow. When they don’t, you need another form of energy!
Creativity results from hard work. In contrast to the “Wind Theory” is the “Sweat Theory.” Edison said that creativity is “one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” The artists and thinkers before the Romantics would have agreed with him. The great painter Sir Joshua Reynolds (1769-1790) instructed his pupils at the Academy of Art to work not on inspiration but on technique.54 Similarly, the great artists of the Italian Renaissance worked for commissions and learned their craft through guild apprenticeships. While building the great dome in Florence, Brunelleschi engaged in hard work. He created an ox-driven cogwheel with a reverse gear to hoist 1,700-pound stones “several hundred feet” to the “cupola.” He invented sandstone-embedded chains to hold the gigantic structure in place without “centering” devices.55 He was not waiting for the winds of inspiration to blow. (For more on the geniuses of the Florentine Renaissance, see Chapters 11 and 13.) Sweat Theorists focus on Stage 1, Preparation, and Stage 2, Concentration.
There is something to be said for both wind and sweat in the exercise of creativity. I received many mini-inspirations while writing this book, but I found that they came from daily writing and thinking about the project. I also found that the more often I wrote, the more easily the words would flow.
Creativity is mysterious. Many artists feel that their products are a gift from something greater than themselves. The ancients spoke of the Daimon, the creator’s genius or Muse, the supernatural entity that allowed him to access higher realms and translate their eternal truths into reality.56 Harold Bloom calls this “genius” “the god within.”57 Director Federico Fellini reports,
From the moment I begin to work . . . someone takes over, a mysterious invader, an invader that I don’t know, takes over the whole show. He directs everything for me. I just put my voice at his disposal, and my know-how, my attempts at being seductive, or borrowing ideas, or being authoritarian. But it’s someone else, not me, with whom I co-exist, but who I don’t know, or know only by hearsay.58
Bloom cites a passage from Emerson’s Journals about the shock of recognition we find in a creative work that echoes our deepest feelings: “‘It is a God in you that responds to God without, or affirms his own words trembling on the lips of another.’”59 This view focuses on Stage 4, Illumination.
Creativity has been studied and defined. In a 1950 address to the American Psychological Association, John Guildford recommended more study of creativity. Since then the books, articles, and studies have proliferated. Between 1920 and 1950, “out of the 121,000 titles listed in Psychological Abstracts . . . only 186 dealt with creativity . . . From the late 1960s until 1991, almost 9,000 references have been added to the creativity literature.”60
If you’re interested in a summary of how major psychologists have studied creativity, a thorough overview is provided in Amabile.61 From an initial focus on mechanical tasks, such as listing the uses of a brick or solving a problem with only one correct answer, psychologists have fanned out in many directions, doing experiments and studying famous creators.
What is Creativity?
So what is creativity? The working definition you will see in many sources is that it is the creation of something both novel and useful.62
For instance, John Lennon is known as a major creative artist. The group he assembled, the Beatles, wrote and performed music that revolutionized the taste of his era and is still enjoyed by listeners today. With succeeding albums, especially Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), the Beatles experimented, pushed the boundaries of music, and provided delight with their lyrics and melodies.
Here is something that John Lennon did that was not so creative.
After talking with Yoko Ono all night their first time together, he made love to her as the dawn rose, and then they recorded an album celebrating their union. Called Two Virgins, it featured their naked bodies on the cover and consisted of electronic noises and caterwauling screeches. The album was undoubtedly meaningful to them—but others were not amused. The record sold only to diehard fans, and the cover photo was blanked out by what looked like a brown paper bag, except for the two heads of the lovers.
This was novelty, but it didn’t have much use. (It may have some use now; the original covers without the brown bags are now worth a small fortune.) In this case Lennon forgot Stages 3, Incubation, and 5, Verification.
The Paradox of Creativity
So creativity is a paradox. It is both person and product, inspiration and perspiration, will and receptivity. It must also be novel yet acceptable. Jacques Barzun comments on the paradox often facing creators: “Most often their work has been hampered and ignored by the very society that now keeps boosting innovation. This paradox takes the form of saying, in words or by actions, ‘We want what is new and wonderful, not the strange and repellent thing you offer.’”63 Something must be new—but not too new. If it is, the audience walks out of the performance or the critic savages the poem or art exhibit. If you could call up some great creative artists of the past, you could ask them how their iconoclastic new work was received at first. Ask Nijinski about the simulated masturbation in his ballet Afternoon of a Faun; ask Stravinsky about his revolutionary chords in Firebird. Ask Melville how Moby Dick was first received; Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Keats, how Romantic poetry was first received; the Impressionists, how their art was received. Ask Galileo how the church liked his refutation of Ptolemy. Ask John Lennon about the strong language in “The Ballad of John and Yoko”: “The way things are going, they’re gonna crucify me!”
Sternberg notes that creative people “often feel attacked
