with conventional ways of thinking and vested interests.” What they don’t understand is that by presenting an idea in opposition, they themselves are generating the attack! “An antithesis is, by its nature, oppositional.”64 Hence the need for such creators to have courage and stand by their independent judgment, which may be vindicated after their death. Vera John-Steiner, perhaps quoting Rollo May, speaks of “‘the courage to create’”:65 to persist despite lack of support or inspiration.
In the next chapter I will present an idea that may seem oppositional. However, I believe that rather than an antithesis, it is a synthesis: a theory that can coexist with traditional views of creativity.
The letters that are bolded and underlined have been crossed out:
B S A I N X L E A T N T E A R S.
Yes, if you cross out “SIX LETTERS,” you get “BANANA”! (Ugh!)
Exercises
1.Explain the ways in which the opening “Interlude” relates to the material in this chapter.
2.Read over the five-step process of creativity (pp. 2-3). How have you experienced it yourself, either while working on class assignments or creating for fun? Are the stages different for you? For instance, do you sometimes return to an earlier stage such as incubation when you have already had some “eureka moment”?
3.In your experience, when has extrinsic motivation (such as working for a grade) interfered with intrinsic motivation (creating for the sheer pleasure)? Is it different in different courses? Is it different in school than in other contexts? How would you advise teachers to draw on intrinsic motivation while still being required to provide a grade?
4.Read over the discussion of the “creative personality” (pp. 9-10). How would you apply these characteristics to yourself and/or someone else you know or know about?
5.How does the “Wind Theory” of creativity apply to you? How does the “Sweat Theory” apply? Explain examples.
6.Have you ever felt vulnerable to attack while expressing your creativity? If so, describe an example or two.
7.List some of the puzzling or unclear ideas in Chapter 1. Ask questions about them.
8.Explain what you think is most important in Chapter 1.
9.React to some of the ideas in Chapter 1. Debate, support, analyze, and/or reflect.
10. Give evidence from your own life or background experience about the ideas in Chapter 1. (Don’t repeat what you have written in another exercise.)
11. Watch the film Hearts of Darkness, and analyze Francis Ford Coppola’s creative process as he made Apocalypse Now. How did he use the stages of creativity? How did he exemplify the creative personality?
19See, for example, Rosanoff and Campbell.
20I have seen the number mentioned as both ten thousand and forty-three thousand.
21See, for example, Simonton, “Creativity as a Constrained Stochastic Process,” 91-92; Weisberg.
22Randall Stross, The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World (New York: Crown, 2007), 66.
23Isaacson, Einstein, 39.
24Henri Poincaré, “Mathematic Creation,” in The Creative Process: Reflections on the Invention in the Arts and Sciences, ed. Brewster Ghiselin (New York: Mentor Books, New American Library, 1952), 38. The three facets, based on his triarchic theory of intelligence, are “its relation to the internal world of the individual, its relation to experience, and its relation to the external world of the individual.” (p. 132)
25Poincaré, “Mathematical Creation,” 38.
26Nathaniel C. Comfort, The Tangled Field: Barbara McClintock’s Search for the Patterns of Genetic Control (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 68.
27Ibid., 67.
28Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 28.
29On the importance of the validation phase to engineers, see Petroski.
30Stross, The Wizard of Menlo Park, 194, 199, 181, 197-198, 253.
31Harold Bloom, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Minds (New York: Warner, 2002), 12.
32Harold Bloom, 20th Anniversary Edition: Dramatists and Dramas (New York: Readers Subscription Book Club, 2006), ix.
33G. H. Hardy, “A Mathematician’s Apology,” cited in Robert P. Crease, The Prism and the Pendulum: The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments in Science (New York: Random House, 2003), xxvi.
34Paul Strathern, The Big Idea Collected: 6 Revolutionary Ideas That Changed the World (New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1999), 54-56; Crease, The Prism and the Pendulum, 64-76.
35Robert J. Sternberg, “Creativity as a Decision.” American Psychologist 57, no. 5 (May 2002): 376.
36Quoted in Isaacson, Einstein, 17.
