What Makes A Creative Person?

If you have ever wondered what makes a person creative, then Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, the psychologist, professor, prize-winning thinker, and best-selling author, may have the answer for you. You should probably begin with his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990), which describes creativity, its tendencies, and manifestations, and then read his follow-up publication, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (1996), which draws from the lives of living creative minds such as philosopher Mortimer Adler, writer Nadine Gordimer, paleontologist and geologist Stephen Jay Gould, poet Anthony Hecht, sculptor Nina Holton, neuropsychologist Brenda Milner, pianist Oscar Peterson, biologist Jonas Salk, writer May Sarton, and pediatrician Benjamin Spock, among dozens more. [I noted a helpful tip from Flow in my October 27, 2007, entry on this blog.]

Here are some snippets from Creativity:

“Creative individuals have a great deal of physical energy, but they are also often quiet and at rest.” (58)

“Creative individuals tend to be smart, yet also naïve at the same time.” (59)

“Creative individuals alternate between imagination and fantasy at one end, and a rooted sense of reality at the other.” (63)

“Most creative persons are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well.” (72)

“The openness and sensitivity of creative individuals often expose them to suffering and pain yet also a great deal of enjoyment.” (73)

“Creative persons differ from one another in a variety of ways, but it one respect they are unanimous: The all love what they do.” (107)

Intrigued? Pick up a copy at your library, bookstore, or online.


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Language Is Not Static—It Changes As We Do

Often people in my writing classes ask me for “the answer.” While I am not one to shy from distinguishing a comma from a semicolon, asserting that affect and effect cannot be used interchangeably, or explaining the difference between an objective and reflexive pronoun (e.g., me or myself), I more than frequently note that so much of language usage is a matter of personal preference and changing trends.

In fact, linguists would insist that the words we use to mean whatever we want them to are arbitrary in their origin—and just as arbitrarily change meaning over time. Ferdinand de Saussure (Swiss, 1857 – 1913), one of the grandfathers of modern linguistics, in particular the study of the relationship between signs and what they signify, makes this point in his landmark book, Course in General Linguistics, when he writes:


“Absolute stability in a language is never found … It would be naïve to suppose that a word can change only up to a certain point, as if there were something in it that could preserve it.” (193 – 208)


Saussure believed that geographical, cultural, climactic, and political factors greatly influence sound changes and, with them, changes in the meaning of words. As the international language of the marketplace, English is especially susceptible to pressures from global influences. Language evolves as we do. A good way to keep track of it is to take a writing course or read a current book on language or writing every three to five years.


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The Writing Challenge: Creating the Context

In his exceptional primer on the study of signs, Semiotics: The Basics (second edition), Daniel Chandler writes:

"Beyond any conscious intention, we communicate through gesture, posture, facial expression, intonation and so on." (48)

Our "real-time" writing sensibilities, driven by e-mail and instant messaging, are all too often the culprit of our miscommunication. When writing, we need context language, or helpful-to-know language, to represent our gestures, postures, facial expressions, intonations, and the like. The context language makes our content language relevant. Examples:

Content Only: doc attchd
Content with Context: Attached is the document you’ll need for our next meeting.

Content: Here’s the quarterly sales report. Explain.
Content with Context: Here is the quarterly sales report for your analysis. Please explain the discrepancy between 4Q06 and 4Q07. Thanks.

Reading that one sentence by Daniel Chandler should remind us that writing cannot be a perfect substitute for speaking—so we need context language to bring the printed word as close as we can to the spoken one.


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Creating Sentence Variety: THE ART OF STYLING SENTENCES

Having just finished The Art of Styling Sentences (fourth edition) by Ann Longknife and K. D. Sullivan, I would recommend it to serious students of writing for four reasons:

1. It offers practical tips for creating sentence variety by arranging words, phrases, and clauses and using by different punctuation marks.

2. It establishes a basic stylistic range by cogently discussing 20 basic sentence patterns.

3. It provides plenty of practice opportunities on each of the sentence patterns by posing key questions for reflection and giving end-of-section exercises.

4. It balances the authors’ approach to style with other rhetorical theories, such a Francis Christiansen’s cumulative and periodic sentences.

My take on the book is simple: For $9 you can’t go wrong. At the least, you are bound to find that you rarely or never use at least a few of the 20 sentence patterns; at best, you could well use the sentences patterns as a starting point from which to fashion more elaborate sentence patterns.


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Use the Writing Process to Open Your Mind—and Theirs

In The Closed Mind (1962), Sanford I. Berman writes:

One of the biggest problems in executive development or teaching people on the job is to get them to admit that they do not understand some of the procedures or operations. If they are a graduate engineer or business school graduate, they seem to feel that it is a serious reflection on their expensive education if they cannot immediately apply “the book” to some specific problem. The most serious blunders, we have found, are made by those who refuse to confess their limitations to themselves.

Forty-five years later, does the quote ring true? Too often, we approach writing situations assuming that we have the answer and that our readers do not, or we send messages under the assumption that our readers know more than they do.

For these reasons, we should use the whole writing process—plan, draft, quality control—to reflect clearly on our audience. Employing the writing process at work is the main focus of my book The Art of On-the-Job Writing.


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You Can’t Do It Alone

A favorite comment in my writing courses is “Seek feedback on your writing.” I am reminded of a similar observation in Mihaly Csikszentmihaly’s Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience:

Why is solitude such a negative experience? The bottom-line answer is that keeping order in the mind from within is very difficult. We need external goals, external stimulation, external feedback to keep attention directed. And when external input is lacking, attention begins to wander, and thoughts become chaotic—resulting in the state we have called psychic entropy.

If you are writing just for yourself, then keep a journal; if you are writing for others, then expect feedback—and accept it prescriptively.

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Balancing the Creative with the Critical

Since many participants of my writing classes express a desire to write a book of their own some day, they often ask me for advice. Of course, I say the usual: Know what you’re writing about … Consider the market for the book … Create a structure for the book … Don’t put off the writing … Set deadlines for paragraphs … Research for interested publishers … and so on. I often include a mention about understanding the difference between what they find interesting and what their readers do.

Nobel Prize laureate Bertrand Russell makes this last point clear in The History of Western Philosophy when discussing Plato’s Theory of Ideas. In setting up his analysis of the allegory of the cave, Russell describes his approach to writing a book:

I have found that, when I wish to write a book on some subject, I must first soak myself in detail, until all the separate parts of the subject-matter are familiar; then, some day, if I am fortunate, I perceive the whole, with all its parts duly interrelated. After that, I only have to write down what I have seen. The nearest analogy is first walking all over a mountain in a mist, until every path and ridge and valley is separately familiar, and then, from a distance, seeing the mountain whole and clear in bright sunshine.

This experience, I believe, is necessary to good creative work, but it is not sufficient; indeed the subjective certainty that it brings with it may be fatally misleading. William James describes a man who got the experience from laughing gas; whenever he was under its influence, he knew the secret of the universe, but when he came to, he had forgotten it. At last, with immense effort, he wrote down the secret before the vision had faded. When completely recovered, he rushed to see what he had written. It was: “A smell of petroleum prevails throughout.” What seems like sudden insight may be misleading, and must be tested soberly when the divine intoxication has passed.

True, inspiration is not only necessary but a big boost in getting us off the clouds and on our butts to start writing—but creativity needs to be followed by intense self-criticism. Answering questions such as, “Are my claims plausible? and “Would anyone care about this?” helps in getting the critical juices flowing.


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