The 4 Stages of the Creative Process

  By Neezes | February 7, 2012 - 1:29 pm | Creativity Leave a comment

Creativity is not so much an ability as a process. In order for something new to be created – for a new idea to develop – the mind goes through a series of cogntive stages.

One of the best known explanations of the stages was set out by Graham Wallas (1926):

1) Preparation: This is the preparatory work on a problem, exploring it and getting your mind ready. Here you engage with the problem, looking over all of the relevant information. It is important not to try too hard to solve it – yet.

EXAMPLE: Mulling over your notes for a poem or first draft for a chapter helps to get your mind ready.

2) Incubation: Now the problem has been internalized, and unconscious cognitive processes are working on it. This could happen while we sleep (see Creativity and REM sleep).

EXAMPLE: Moving on to other work or tasks with our current piece of writing ‘at the back of our mind’.

3) Illumination: Here we gain a sudden insight – the solution to the problem comes to us. Sometimes this well be preceded by a feeling that the answer is on its way.

EXAMPLE: Suddenly getting that good idea for how to end your story or chapter.

4) Verification: Here we examine and analyse the idea, to verify whether it is a genuine solution to our problem – and perhaps work out some of the finer details.

EXAMPLE: Having had a great idea for the ending to our story, we figure out the details of what we need out main characters to do in order to get there.

For a writer, the frustrating aspect of this is not knowing how long incubation will take -and the lack of certainty that insight will occur at all. However, there are things that can be done

  • Firstly, make sure that your preparation is thorough – that you have fully taken in and turned over the problem in your mind at the start.
  • Secondly, Krashen (2001) notes that incubation often works best with relaxation, and that insights often come to scientists during repetitive physical activities such as walking and gardening.

So your most important work may take place away from the screen!

References
Krashen, S. (2001). Incubation: A Neglected Aspect of the Composing Process? ESL Journal, 4(2): 10-11.

Wallas, G. (1926). The Art of thought. London: Jonathan Cape.

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Great Writing Spaces

  By Neezes | December 21, 2011 - 12:29 pm | Writing spaces Leave a comment

I find it very hard to get down to writing until my surroundings are ‘right’ – and sadly, I am far from finding the perfect place for writing.  Most of my writing is done while on a train journey/commute, or in any of a dozen places around the house.

While I try to improve this situation by finding an elegant, practical and childproof space (a task that may take several years…) I can at least share images of some remarkable and beautiful workspaces from creative writers and poets.  This one is from Rudyard Kipling:

Kipling's desk

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Memory distortion and the ‘war of the ghosts’

  By Neezes | November 25, 2011 - 12:17 pm | Psychology Leave a comment

In the early 20th Century, most mainstream psychologists, especially in the USA, were influenced by the behaviourist approach, which tended to ignore cognitive processes.

Sir Frederic Bartlett, working at Cambridge University, was therefore unusual for his time in that he studied memory using meaningful material such as folk stories and pictures.

He found that people change the material as they try to recall it. this could occur over a series of recollections, rather like the game known as Chinese Whispers. The distortions which occurred could be dramatic:

Bartlett used a series of recollections to study how images get distorted

One reason for the changes is the action of what Bartlett called a schema: a stored set of knowledge about a concept which guides behaviour. These are used to prompt memory, and sometimes to fill gaps if we are unsure.

His most famous memory tasks involved a Native American folk story called ‘War of the Ghosts’:

One night two young men from Egulac went down to the river to hunt seals and while they were there it became foggy and calm. Then they heard war-cries, and they thought: “Maybe this is a war-party”. They escaped to the shore, and hid behind a log. Now canoes came up, and they heard the noise of paddles, and saw one canoe coming up to them. There were five men in the canoe, and they said:
“What do you think? We wish to take you along. We are going up the river to make war on the people.”
One of the young men said,”I have no arrows.”
“Arrows are in the canoe,” they said.
“I will not go along. I might be killed. My relatives do not know where I have gone. But you,” he said, turning to the other, “may go with them.”
So one of the young men went, but the other returned home.
And the warriors went on up the river to a town on the other side of Kalama. The people came down to the water and they began to fight, and many were killed. But presently the young man heard one of the warriors say, “Quick, let us go home: that Indian has been hit.” Now he thought: “Oh, they are ghosts.” He did not feel sick, but they said he had been shot.
So the canoes went back to Egulac and the young man went ashore to his house and made a fire. And he told everybody and said: “Behold I accompanied the ghosts, and we went to fight. Many of our fellows were killed, and many of those who attacked us were killed. They said I was hit, and I did not feel sick.”
He told it all, and then he became quiet. When the sun rose he fell down. Something black came out of his mouth. His face became contorted. The people jumped up and cried.
He was dead.

This was read out at the end of one of my 1st year psychology lectures, and the next day we were asked to write down what we could remember. One thing I did recall was the ‘something black came out of his mouth’. Bartlett observed this in his participants, describing it as:

  • Preservation of detached detail.

Other features he observed in his participants’ recall included:

  • Simplification – stories became more basic
  • Addition – adding things in which weren’t present
  • Subtraction – removing elements
  • Transformation – things were changed to make them seem more familiar

All of this involves distorting a hard-to-remember stimulus to make it fit better with the participants’ schemas. They made an effort to make sense of the story – but struggled because it came from a different culture. Bartlett called this attempt ‘effort after meaning’ – and considered it to be a key factor in memory distortions.

Reference

Bartlett, F.C. (1932). Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Quote: John Irving

  By Neezes | September 8, 2011 - 7:57 pm | Quotes Leave a comment

Author John Irving is best known for his novels ‘The World According to Garp’ and ‘The Cider House Rules’. This is in extract from an interview in Sept 2011, discussing his forthcoming work, ‘In One Person’.

Q. Can one assume that, like your other novels, “In One Person’’ began with its final sentence? That what you’ve called your “roadmap in reverse’’ formula still applies?

A. It does. But if I thought of a better last sentence midway through, I wouldn’t hesitate to use it. This isn’t a belief system, in other words. I’ve never prescribed it as a way other writers should write, either. Still, I’ve always found it hard to start writing a book not knowing what was going to happen.

To date, John Irving has written 14 novels.

Q. In revisiting plot elements like the death of a child, you’ve said you write about the things you obsessively fear, not necessarily what’s happened to you personally. Is that true for this book?

A. Of all the things you choose in life, you don’t get to choose what your nightmares are. You don’t pick them; they pick you. It’s never far into the writing process before I think, oh God, here they come again: those emotional and psychological territories you’ve explored before. That said, “In One Person’’ is probably my most political novel since “Cider House.’’ Only that and “Owen Meany’’ – one dealt with abortion, the other with Vietnam – are by my definition political.

Source: Boston Globe – boston.com

Writing skills 2: developing ideas

  By Neezes | September 1, 2011 - 10:53 am | Creative writing skills, Reading (for writers) Leave a comment

Just after writing my last post on generating ideas, I read Paul Magrs state that “For every one of my published novels and stories there’s another one that I wasn’t happy with or that didn’t quite work out in the end” (Magrs, 2001: 17).  He seemed to be saying that writing is not primarily about flashes of inspiration, but about learning the craft of developing your ideas.  Which leads me neatly on to this week’s skill…

Bits of stories

When I first started creative writing, I used to jot down short story ideas (or what I thought were short story ideas), but didn’t know how to go from an idea (or a half-idea, or quarter-idea) to a full story. For example, I once jotted down that I would write a story about a person who tried to liberate farm animals, in the way that some people try to liberate laboratory animals. This is not really an idea on its own: it’s a context, but it isn’t really a story.

These animals are context rather than story.

Key elements

It’s great to note down these sort of things – perhaps the sort of thing that might come up when you brainstorm for story ideas – but it’s just as important to learn how to craft an idea or a group of ideas into a story.

The problem was that my idea above didn’t contain all the elements of a story, which include:

  • Initiating action – a problem of some kind that triggers off the events.
  • Conflict – the key character being opposed/thwarted by other people and/or society.
  • Rising tension – the conflict should get tenser as we go along.
  • Resolution/denouement – the key point where the central conflict comes to a head and is resolved for good or bad.

Most of all, something needs to happen – somebody needs to want something and/or have something that they are putting at risk and fear to lose.  There needs to be action, and for most genres, the characters have to behave in believable ways.

If you have the beginnings of a story - an idea or context - think about you could develop the four elements above.  You could call this your story’s structure.  A novel is really no different, but would usually contain several conflicts and resolutions, and a larger cast of characters.

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Reading

As anyone will tell you, a writer really must carefully read the work of other authors to find out more about crafting ideas into stories, and structuring those story well. One of the greatest things about creative writing is that sooner or later, you begin to read other people’s work more carefully and perceptively.  With an eye for story and structure!

Reading becomes an increasingly useful experience to the writer.

This means that rather than reading vast amounts in preparation for becoming a writer, your reading skills should progress together with your writing skills, and have a positive effect on each other.

Reference
Magrs, P. (2001).  Clearing some space.  In Bell, J. and Magrs, P. (eds.), The Creative Writing Coursebook.  London: Pan Macmillan.

Cows – image by anonphotography.

Short stories – image by dalcrose.

Psychology: literature can your improve mind

  By Neezes | August 29, 2011 - 10:14 pm | Psychology, Reading (for writers) 2 Comments

It is something that is taken for granted by writers and book lovers, but the scientific evidence is starting to catch up: reading can broaden your mind, increase your mental abilities and even develop your personality.

Raymond Mar of York University states reading can impact on many aspects of our lives:

“I think it’s possible that reading could also have important consequences for…the social realm, our ability to understand other people, our ability to think in abstract terms, imagination, these sorts of things.”

Reading can develop the human mind.

According to Mar, one reason for this is that the way our minds interpret a text is very similar to how the real world is experienced.  Reading can therefore function much like having real world experiences.

However, although any form of reading can have basic benefits such as developing our vocabulary and improving reading speed, literature seems to have unique benefits.

Evidence for this comes from a fascinating study by Djikic et al. (2009).  The researchers used two versions of Anton Chekhov’s classic short story, ‘The Lady with the Dog‘ – one was the original, and one was a non-literary version which conveyed the same information.  The latter was written by the researchers, and was of equal reading difficulty and length.  It was judged by readers to be just as interesting, but not as artistic as the original.

When a comparison was made of readers using the two versions of the story, it was found that readers showed bigger changes of emotion and personality traits after reading the original Chekhov story.  It appeared to have affected them more as people, and as an experience.

One other fascinating finding was that changes in personality traits were highly individual.  Each reader seemed to have been affected in a unique way – perhaps depending on what they brought to the story.

Reference

Djikic, M., Oatley, K., Zoeterman, S. and Peterson, J.J. (2009). On being moved by art: How reading fiction transforms the self. Creativity Research Journal, 21, 24-29.

Image by Ginnerobot.

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REM sleep and creativity

  By Neezes | August 25, 2011 - 2:34 pm | Creativity, Psychology Leave a comment

I’ve been getting really interested in the research into sleep and cognition. It’s been known for many years that problem solving is improved by a spell of REM sleep in comparison to wake or deep sleep (Cartwight, 1971). More recently, sleep has been shown to play a role in memory, too (Walker et al, 1993).

What is REM sleep?

REM sleep is a phase of light sleep where the brain is very active. It is characterized by dreams and by a much greater state of physical arousal than other sleep phases. The initials REM stand for rapid eye movement, as the eyes are known to flick rapidly from side to side during this phase.  We go through 4-5 such phases in a typical night’s sleep.

REM is one of the normal phases of sleep.

If sleep can affect problem solving and memory, then it could play a role in creativity too. It is known that creative types tend to be more active in the evening than other people, and that successful musicians tend to practice especially in the morning. There are many anecdotal accounts of sleep leading to creative ideas, from Paul McCartney’s composition of ‘Yesterday’ to Here Kekulé’s discovery of the formula for the benzene ring.Link with creativity

Current Research

Wagner et al (2004) have found that sleep aids the processes of linking ideas into new combinations, helping to form creative insights. Again, this was found to occur during REM sleep. Cai et al (2009) found that creativity was boosted following REM sleep compared to a non-REM sleep. Both studies concluded that their findings were not due to improved memory after REM.

Dreams mainly occur during the REM phase of sleep.

There is more to be learned on this, and research studies tend to involve fairly artificial task, but it certainly seems relevant to people’s real-life creative work.  Have you had any experience of creative insights after sleep? Do you deliberately walk away from problems and decisions with the intention of ‘sleeping on it’?

References

Caia, D.J., Mednickb, S.A., Harrisona, E.M., Kanadyc, J.C. and Mednickc, S.C. (2009). REM, not incubation, improves creativity by priming associative networks. PNAS, 106(25), 10130-10134.
Cartwight, R. (1971). Problem solving in REM, NREM and waking. Am. Psychol. Sleep Soc., 9, 108
Wagner, U; Gais, S; Haider, H; Verleger, R; Born, J. (2004). Sleep inspires insight. Nature, 427, 352–5.
Walker, M.P., Brakefield, T, Hobson, J.A. and Stickgold, R. (2003). Dissociable stages of human memory consolidation and reconsolidation. Nature, 425, 616-20.

Subway image: Smath,  Fairy image: Alexandria LaNier.

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Quote: Nicole Krauss

  By Neezes | August 14, 2011 - 9:21 pm | Quotes Leave a comment

This week’s quote comes from American novelist Nicole Krauss, author of Man Walks Into a Room, The History of Love and Great House.

Great House is Krauss's third novel

“I used to write mostly in the third person, but now I’m writing only in the first person. I’ve discovered that what thrills me is the sheer intimacy of becoming someone else. In the case of Great House, I felt these people were so naked, and in the process of stepping into their shoes, you’re also shining a light on yourself, and these two things are tangled up in ways I can’t even untangle.”

Source: Interview with The Observer, Feb 2011

The issue of 1st v’s 3rd person is a tricky one for many writers – do you empathise with Krauss’s psychological motivation – stepping into another person’s shoes?  Or are you put off by the limitations of telling a story from just one person’s perspective?

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How personality psychology can help with building fiction characters

  By Neezes | August 8, 2011 - 12:53 pm | Psychology 2 Comments

There’s a lot of good, well-established research on personality which writers could benefit from looking at.

Why?  Well, when creating characters, creative writers are doing something very similar to what a personality psychologist wants to do – create a model of a person’s character which will allow accurate predictions of how that character will act in future.  You want to ‘know’ your characters inside out?  Then why not piggy-back on some of the most useful concepts that psychologists have come up with over the years:

 

1) Openness to experience

This is one of the ‘big five’ traits of the five factor model of personality – a model which is widely used in contemporary Psychology research. Openness, or ‘openness to experience’ involves being sensitive, imaginative, and intellectually curious. An open person is willing to try new things, and doesn’t dismiss ideas without giving them reasonable consideration.

In fiction, an open character would be eager to travel to new places and try new foods and activities. They wouldn’t consider their beliefs to be set in stone, but would be willing to discuss and re-examine almost anything.

 

2) Extraversion v’s introversion

Popularised by the research of Jung, these traits lie on either end of a scale.  It is all about how outgoing a person is – is your character a party person, or more of a stay-at-home-with-a-book type?  Or somewhere in the middle?

The differences are quite fundamental, with the brains of introverts and extraverts reacting in different ways (Johnson et al., 1999).  Extraversion can affect the clothes a person wears (Sharma, 1980), and extraverts tend to listen to more upbeat music.  This is a simple but useful consideration when writing about a character.

Extraverts tend to wear more decorative clothes.

 

3) Neuroticism

Along with extraversion, neuroticism is one of the three key traits in Hans Eysenck‘s model of personality, as well as the more recent five factor model.  It relates to how emotionally stable a person is, and how well they deal with daily stressors.3) Neuroticism

A very similar concept comes up in the self-help classic, ‘The Road Less Travelled’, in which M. Scott Peck talked about two dysfunctional approaches to problems: blaming yourself too much, or tending to always blame others.  In his view, stability lies in the middle of a scale, with either extreme being problematic.  How do your characters react to difficulties and disagreements?

A person's view of who is to blame will affect their behaviour in an argument.

 

4) Psychoticism, or…?

Psychoticism is the third trait of Eysenck’s classic theory, and the least well-supported by research.  It was initially intended to describe people who are hostile, aggressive and socially difficult.  More recently, it has been viewed as a lack of two separate traits:

- Agreeableness (v’s Machiavellianism)
- Conscientiousness (v’s indiscipline)

An agreeable person attempts to cooperate with others and strives for harmony.  These people tend to be optimistic about human nature.  In contrast, someone low in this trait will be usually be selfish and manipulative, and put individual success ahead of group harmony.  Does your character try to help others, or are they basically out for themselves?

A conscientious person is responsible and hard working – this person will probably have a neat desk, too! Research has found that conscientious people tend to have more successful careers (Salgado, 1999). Such a character will find it hard to let go of their aims, and may get very tied up by duty and the need to follow a process through to completion.  Something a writer can always do with…

References
Johnson, D. L., Wiebe, J. S., Gold, S. M., Andreasen, N. C. (1999). Cerebral blood flow and personality: A positron emission tomography study. American Journal of Psychiatry, 156, 252–257.
Salgado, J.F. (1997). The five factor model of personality and job performance in the European community. Journal of Applied Psychology, 82(1), 30–43.
Sharma, R. S. (1980). Clothing behaviour, personality, and values: A correlational study. Psychological Studies, 25, 137–142.

Images by Saad.Akhtar and Meredith_Farmer

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Writers avoid procrastination with goals and visualisation

  By Neezes | July 24, 2011 - 3:56 am | Creative writing skills Leave a comment

Writers and artists have to fit in their creative work around their other commitments – often on top of another job.  By its nature, writing is a poorly-defined task, with no clear start or endpoint each day.  And a couple of hours often makes very little difference to the overall progress.

This can make it very easy to let the writing take over your life… or to procrastinate! Somehow, having a tidy desk starts to seem more important than getting on with work. And of course, it’s important to fit in some ‘research’ – i.e. surfing/reading. Click here to find your current status in the ‘procrastination flow chart’!

The humble 'to do' list

Goals

One of the oldest tricks in the Psychology textbook is to set goals – preferably realistic, short-term ones.  As Jim Rohn says on his blog post, breaking down the work of writing a novel into daily chunks makes it seem much easier:

‘Suppose I ask if you can write a page and a quarter a day for one year. Do you think you could do it? Now the task is starting to seem more manageable.’

To-do lists might seem like the sort of thing a writer wants to leave behind together with other trappings of the day job.  But what is important for the office could be doubly important for a job that relies on being self-motivated. Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) found that self-imposed deadlines make a real difference to productivity.

There are also a couple of useful techniques that can be borrowed from therapy. One, from cognitive-behavioural therapy, is the ABC technique. This means that each item on a to-do list is labelled with ‘A’ – essential, ‘B’ – important, or ‘C’ – fun, but not important. The As are then done first, and so on. This provides a structure which makes it much easier to do something we all know to be a good idea – leaving the fun tasks to the end as a reward for hard work.

Visualise

Visualising success has been shown to work for athletes, helping them to achieve success and motivation. You can even improve at a task just by visualising it, but be careful what you choose to visualise – McCrea et al (2008) have shown that if you think about something in terms of concrete, short-term outcomes (e.g. completing a poem) you are much less likely to procrastinate than if you think about something more abstract and long-term (e.g. becoming famous).

Strangely, Libby et al (2007) have shown that visualisation is more likely to affect behaviour when done from a 3rd person perspective. So rather than thinking about what successful day would seem like to you, think about how it would appear to those around you.

Self forgiveness

One final thing – when you do suffer from a day of procrastinating, don’t beat yourself up about it. Wohl et al (2010) have found that when a person forgives themselves for a the wasted time, they are much less likely to procrastinate the next day if they just forgive themselves. In other words, it is not helpful to spend time and energy thinking of what you should have done in the past. So move on!

References
Ariely, D. and Wertenbroch, K. (2002). Procrastination, Deadlines, and Performance: Self-Control by Precommitment. Psychological Science, 13(3), 219-224.
Libby, L.K., Shaeffer, E.M., Eibach, R.P. & Slemmer, J.A. (2007). Picture yourself at the polls. Visual perspective in mental imagery affects self-perception and behaviour. Psychological Science, 18, 199-203.
McCrea, S.M., Liberman, N., Trope, Y. and Sherman, S.J. (2008). Construal Level and Procrastination. Psychological Science, 19(12), 1308-1314.
Wohl, M., Pychyl, T., & Bennett, S. (2010). I forgive myself, now I can study: How self-forgiveness for procrastinating can reduce future procrastination. Personality and Individual Differences, 48(7), 803-808.

Image by John.Schultz

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