Creativity (12 page)

The five-stage view of the creative process may be too simplified, and it can be misleading, but it does offer a relatively valid and simple way to organize the complexities involved. Therefore, I use these categories to describe how creative people work, starting with the beginning phase, that of preparation. It is essential to remember in what follows, however, that the five stages in reality are not exclusive but typically overlap and recur several times before the process is completed.

T
HE
E
MERGENCE OF
P
ROBLEMS

Occasionally it is possible to arrive at a creative discovery without any preparation. The fortunate person simply stumbles into a wholly unpredictable situation, as Roentgen did when he tried to find out why his photographic plates were being ruined and discovered radiation in the process. But usually insights tend to come to prepared minds, that is, to those who have thought long and hard about a given set of problematic issues. There are three main sources from which problems typically arise: personal experiences, requirements of the domain, and social pressures. While these thr
ee sources of inspiration are usually synergistic and intertwined, it is easier to consider
them separately, as if they acted independently, which in reality is not the case.

Life as a Source of Problems

We have seen that Grazia Livi’s idea for a story about the conflict between career and femininity was influenced by her own experiences as a woman. From the time she was a little girl, her parents expected her two brothers to be educated and successful while Grazia and her sister were expected to grow up to be traditional housewives. Throughout her life Livi rebelled against the role cut out for her. Even though she married and had children, she resolved to become successful on her own. It is this direct experience in her own life that made her sensitive to the episodes invol
ving career women that she jotted down in her diary.

The origins of problematic elements in life experience are easiest to see in the work of artists, poets, and humanists in general. Eva Zeisel, who was considered the “dumb one” in a family that eventually included two Nobel laureates and many other outstanding male scientists, also resolved to prove herself by breaking away from traditional family interests and becoming an independent artist. Most of the creative ideas for her pottery come from a tension between two contrasting, self-imposed requirements: to make pots that conform to the human hand and are steeped in tradition, and yet can be ma
ss-produced inexpensively by modern technology.

Poets like Anthony Hecht, György Faludy, and Hilde Domin write down daily impressions, events, and especially feelings on index cards or in notebooks, and these caches of experience are the raw material out of which their work evolves. “I had a friend, a poet called Radnòty, who wrote poems I considered atrocious,” says Faludy. “And then after suffering in the concentration camps it changed him totally and he wrote wonderful verse. Suffering is not bad: It helps you very much. Do you know a novel about happiness? Or a film about happy people? We are a perverse race, only suffering interests us.”
He then relates how once when he was sitting in a cabin on beautiful Vancouver Island, trying to find inspiration to start a poem, he could think of nothing interesting. Finally, a set of strong images occurred to him: Five secret policemen arrive in a boat, break into the cabin, throw his books out of the window into the sea, take him five thousand miles to Siberia, and beat him mercilessly—a great
scenario for a poem, one with which the poet was unfortunately all too familiar.

The historian Natalie Davis describes the project she is working on, a book about three women of the seventeenth century, one Jewish, one Catholic, one Protestant, exploring the “sources of adventuresomeness for women”:

The painter Ed Paschke tears off dozens of arresting images each day from magazines and newspapers and keeps these strange or funny cutouts in boxes to which he returns occasionally for inspiration. Rummaging through these icons of the times he may find one that he projects on the wall and uses as a starting point for a sardonic pictorial commentary. Another painter, Lee Nading, tears off newspaper headlines that have to do with the conflict of nature and technology—
DAM ENDANGERS RARE FISH
or
TRAIN FULL OF GARBAGE
DERAILS IN IOWA
—and eventually uses one of them to inspire a canvas. To understand why Nading is particularly sensitive to this kind of event, it helps to know that he had a beloved elder brother who committed suicide just as his career was becoming successful. This brother worked at one of the most prestigious scientific research laboratories but became disillusioned with the competitiveness and the lack of concern for human consequences that he felt around him. Nading never quite forgave science for having contributed to his brother’s death, and he finds in the threats posed by the
fruits of science the source for his artistic problems.

Artists find inspiration in “real” life—emotions like love and anxiety, events like birth and death, the horrors of war, and a peaceful afternoon in the country. We shall see in a little while that artists are also influenced in the choice of their problems by the domain and the field. It has been said that every painting is a response to all previous paintings, and every poem reflects the history of poetry. Yet paintings and poems are also very clearly inspired by the artist’s experiences.

The experiences of scientists are relevant to the problems they deal
with in a much more general, but perhaps not less important way. This has to do with the fundamental interest and curiosity the scientist brings to the task. One of the very first studies of creative scientists, conducted by Ann Roe, concluded that the chemists and physicists in her sample became interested as children in the properties of matter because the normal interests of childhood were not accessible to them. Their parents were emotionally distant, they had few friends, they were not very athletic. Perhaps this kind of generalization is drawn with too thick a brush, but the
basic idea underlying it—that early experience predisposes a young person to be interested in a certain range of problems—is probably sound.

For instance, the physicist Viktor Weisskopf, describes with great emotion the sense of awe and wonder he felt when, as a young man, he and a friend used to climb in the Austrian Alps. Many of the great physicists of his generation, like Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, and Hans Bethe, claim that what inspired them to try to understand the movement of atoms and stars was the exhilaration they felt at the sight of tall peaks and the night sky.

Linus Pauling became interested in chemistry when his father, a pharmacist in turn-of-the-century Portland, let him mix powders and potions in the back of the drugstore. The young Pauling was fascinated by the fact that two different substances could turn into a third entirely different one. He experienced a godlike sense of being able to create something entirely new. By the age of seven he had read and practically memorized the enormous
Pharmacopoeia
containing the knowledge of basic elements and mixtures a pharmacist was expected to know. It was this early curiosity about
how matter could be transformed that fueled Pauling’s career for the next eighty years. The psychologist Donald Campbell makes the point that the difference between a scholar who comes up with new ideas and one who does not is often a difference in curiosity:

Without a burning curiosity, a lively interest, we are unlikely to persevere long to make a significant new contribution. This kind of interest is rarely only intellectual in nature. It is usually rooted in deep feelings, in memorable experiences that need some sort of resolution—a resolution that can be achieved only by a new artistic expression or a new way of understanding. Someone who is motivated solely by the desire to become rich and famous might struggle hard to get ahead but will rarely have enough inducement to work beyond what is necessary, to venture beyond what is already known.

The Influence of Past Knowledge

The other main source of problems is the domain itself. Just as personal experiences produce tensions that cannot be resolved in terms of ordinary solutions, so does working within a symbolic system. Over and over, both in the arts and the sciences, the inspiration for a creative solution comes from a conflict suggested by the “state of the art.” Every domain has its own internal logic, its pattern of development, and those who work within it must respond to this logic. A young painter in the 1960s had two choices: Either paint in the fashionable abstract expressionist style or discover a viab
le way of rebelling against it. Natural scientists in the early part of this century were confronted by the development of quantum theory in physics: Many of the most challenging problems in chemistry, biology, astronomy, as well as physics, were generated by the possibility of applying quantum theory to these new realms. Freeman Dyson’s concern with quantum electrodynamics is only one example.

Gerald Holton, a physicist who later turned to the history of science, gives a lucid account of how a problematic issue in the domain can fuse with a personally felt conflict to suggest the theme for a person’s lifework. As a graduate student at Harvard, Holton was immersed in the heady atmosphere of logical positivism. His teachers and fellow students were bent on demonstrating that science could be reduced to an absolutely logical enterprise. Nothing intuitive or metaphysical was admitted to this new domain. But Holton, who read about the way Kepler and Einstein had worked, star
ted to feel that the kind of science everyone around him took for granted did not apply to some of the most celebrated scientific breakthroughs.

Holton describes the genesis of his own intellectual problem as a conjunction of personal interest and a sense that something was askew in the intellectual environment:

An intellectual problem is not restricted to a particular domain. Indeed, some of the most creative breakthroughs occur when an idea that works well in one domain gets grafted to another and revitalizes it. This was certainly the case with the widespread applications of physics’ quantum theory to neighboring disciplines like chemistry and astronomy. Creative people are ever alert to what colleagues across the fence are doing. Manfred Eigen, whose recent work involves the attempt to replicate inorganic evolution in the laboratory, is bringing together concepts and experimental
procedures from physics, chemistry, and biology. The ideas coalesced in part from conversations over the years with colleagues from different disciplines—whom he invited to informal winter meetings in Switzerland.

A large majority of our respondents were inspired by a tension in their domain that became obvious when looked at from the perspective of another domain. Even though they do not think of themselves as interdisciplinary, their best work bridges realms of ideas. Their histories tend to cast doubt on the wisdom of overspecialization, where bright young people are trained to become exclusive experts in one field and shun breadth like the plague.

And then there are people who sense problems in “real” life that cannot be accommodated within the symbolic system of any existing domain. Barry Commoner, trained as a biophysicist, decided to step out of the formalities of the academic approach and confront such issues as the quality of water and the disposal of garbage. His problems are defined by real-life concerns, not disciplines.