Letter 33: August 18, 2008
You know about behaviorist psychology, right? About how people like B. F. Skinner believed all human behavior could be explained in terms of stimulus and response? That everything was a matter of ringing bells and salivating dogs?
For those people there was no such thing as "creativity." A person who happened to do something beautiful or useful received positive feedback from those around her, and would be encouraged to do it again. And by repeating the process, a person would learn to do more and more of these beautiful things, until she ended up producing a series of novels or symphonies.
Well, of course there are difficulties with that approach. One example: it implies that all humans have an equal chance of writing great symphonies, when in fact hardly any of us have done it. It also has trouble explaining how people are stimulated to work for months or years on their novels, when they may be getting no feedback along the way.
But you can't throw behaviorism out just like that. Smart people believe in it and they can explain the difficulties. One of them is Robert Epstein (if you're interested in this stuff you may remember him as editor of Psychology Today not long ago).
Epstein came up with Generativity Theory in 1991 and is still working on it today. It says that new behaviors can always be explained as combinations of old ones. Epstein knows what skills you need to do the combining. There are four of them:
- capturing new ideas as they occur,
- taking on difficult tasks,
- "broadening" (seeking knowledge and skills beyond your area of expertise), and
- seeking out new stimuli.
In research very recently, Epstein and colleagues showed that these skills can be taught and that they produce a significant increase in (what they identified as) creative output.
Well, what of it? Let's look quickly at those tools. Some people will tell you that all writers keep notebooks where inspirations are recorded before they can disappear. And other people won't. Some people will tell you that challenge is essential to the best creative work. And other people won't. Some people will tell you "write what you know." And other people won't.
But I do like that first one. In the course of my work with clients, every few days I hear some amazing story that deserves to become a book. I'm not looking for a story that wants to become a book, but let's pretend I am. Let's be optimistic and say that one out of ten of these stories really would make a good book. If I haven't been noting them down as they come to me, I may have to wait two or three months for the right one to swing by. And if you ask me why I didn't record them, I'll have no answer.
Something you can try today: keep a record of ideas. Sometimes just a word, sometimes a plot, sometimes a character, sometimes an excerpt. Most of them you'll trash later. Even so, years from now you'll thank me.
David
David Jung McGarva
+1 (818) 707 1871
Write me: david at todayiwrite dot com
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