On Creativity

After the death of Norman Mailer, who was noted for his tendency to swing for the fences and either hit a home run or embarrass himself, Joel Achenbach has blogged a two-part series on creativity, titled "When Genius Bombs."

I'm going to quote it at length because I like it so much. Emphases are mine.

Geniuses mess up too. This is a phenomenon that permeates the creative world.

There is bad Beethoven. There are failed Picassos. There are incorrect theories by Albert Einstein. Duke Ellington would be the first to say that some riffs worked better than others. In the 1940s Orson Welles made both the instant classic "Citizen Kane" and the instant trivia answer "The Lady From Shanghai."

Just because you are a great composer named Wagner doesn't mean that everything you do will be Wagnerian.

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The problem with "genius" is that it doesn't give the great talents their due for working hard and plodding through difficult problems and taking chances and knowing which ideas to dump and which to deliver. Geniuses create the same way total ding-dongs create. Geniuses still have to put on their paint one stroke at a time.

Picasso would paint something, look at it -- at this point it would fetch a staggering price simply because it was a Picasso -- and then just paint over it, start again, because it wasn't good enough.

W.H. Auden once said, "The chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor."

(snip)

George Bernard Shaw talked about the "field theory" of creativity, borrowing a term from physics. Good ideas do not exist alone but in a larger field of imagination. As a young man Shaw wrote five novels. Can you name one? Shaw had to work through his novelist phase before he could arrive, in his late thirties, as a playwright.

Shaw believed in productivity -- just keep writing, was his advice to everyone. Norma Jenckes, a Shaw scholar at the University of Cincinnati, says Shaw's attitude was that "you had to write yourself through all sorts of things, and then something might become your masterpiece."

Herein lies the lesson for everyone, the pros, the amateurs, the dumb-dumbs, anyone who has ever tried to think creatively. Humans are by nature a creative species, but we have to learn to manage our creativity, feed it, weed it, prune it, whack it back if necessary. We have to forgive our mistakes. No one is always brilliant.

Children instinctively know this. It is only as they grow up that society drums into their little noggins the fact that they're without real talent and ought to put down the crayons and the finger paint and learn to watch television like everyone else.

(snip)

The academics who study creativity have concluded that geniuses come up with ideas and analyze situations pretty much like everyone else. "Nobody is a genius simply because of the shape of their head and their brain," says Howard Gardner, a professor of education at Harvard. "People get ideas. Nobody knows where ideas come from. And they try to work them out. And people who are the best artists are very good working out the implications of those ideas. But it's not the case that every idea is a good idea."

(snip)

Within a field such as math, someone can be good at one thing and inept at another. The mathematician Henri Poincare could not add. He wrote, "I must confess I am absolutely incapable of doing an addition sum without a mistake."

(snip)

Mark Rosenthal, a curator at the National Gallery, applies the rule to artists: "The really good ones are trying extremely hard every time out. They're always trying to make a masterpiece, they're always trying to do something wonderful."

He says that being creative is a lonely job. Every artist's studio is the same. There is one chair. The artist paints half the day, and sits in the chair the other half of the day, looking critically at the art. "There's only one chair because artists work alone. And they sit there. I'm sure if we could be transported back to Rembrandt's time, it'd be the same thing. There'd be one chair."

(snip)

Robert Sternberg, a Yale psychologist and co-author of "Defying the Crowd: Cultivating Creativity in a Culture of Conformity," says creativity has three aspects:

1. Synthetic. You have to generate ideas. Geniuses come up with a lot more ideas than everyone else. "In most fields, the people who really are well known are prodigious. They're large-volume producers. But you don't even realize that in their repertoire is a lot of junk. You just don't hear about the junk," says Sternberg.

2. Analytic. You have to know which ideas are the good ones. J. Carter Brown recalls the prayer that the esteemed art critic Bernard Berenson used to say: "Our Father, who art in Heaven, give us this day our daily idea, and forgive us the one we had yesterday."

3. Practical. You need to know how to market the idea. How to pitch it.

(snip)

Leon Botstein, the composer, says you can't plan your breakthroughs. You just have to keep plugging away, and wait, and hope.

"Breakthrough is not when you want it, it's not when you expect it. It's a function of the constant activity. It is only the constant activity that generates the breakthrough."

And what causes the constant activity? It's not money. It's not glory. It's an "inner necessity," he says. Unless you have this inner necessity to create, you'll probably never do anything of brilliance, Botstein believes.

"Without constant, almost irrational, obsessive engagement, you'll never make the breakthrough," he says. "The difference between you and the person you consider great is not raw ability. It's the inner obsessiveness. The inability to stop thinking about it. It's a form of madness."

So this is what separates the great ones from the rest of the world. It is not simply that they are smarter, savvier, more brilliant. They are geniuses because they can't stand to be anything else.