We laymen have always been curious to know…from what source that strange being, the creative writer, draws his material, and how he manages to make such impression on us with it
—Freud, 1908.
The Psychology of Creative Writing is a highly recommended book for those who want to learn how the magic wand of storytellers work. A compilation of essays discussing the personalities of writers, the evolution of creative writing, the creative process, the development of both the creative writer and creative writing, and so on.
‘Creative adults achieve effectiveness partially by force of personality. Talented adults who achieve success posses many of the attributes listed below’, by Jane Pirto
Creative people are those who do creative acts. The creativity occurs in the becoming, the making.
Many studies have emphasized that successful creators in all domains have certain personality attributes in common.
These attributes make up the base of the model and rest on the foundation of genes. Among these are the following: androgyny, creativity, imagination, insight, intuition, introversion, naiveté or openness to experience, overexcitabilities, motivation or passion for work in a domain, perceptiveness, preference for complexity, resilience, risk taking, self-discipline, self-efficacy, tolerance for ambiguity, and volition or will.
‘The more I write, the better I write, and the better I feel about myself’ by Adèle Kohanyi
Creativity also affects mood and, in the case of writing, mostly positively. Indeed, a wide variety of participants writing about a wide variety of topics have demonstrated that writing has a positive effect on mood.
This is not to say that any type of writing is beneficial. What appears to be important is that the topic triggers an emotional reaction, positive or negative.
‘Who are those guys?’—Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy [Eminent screenwriters] by Steven R. Pritzker and David Jung McGarva
Donald Ogden Stewart said in 1982 that a formal dinners one was seated according to important at the box office. Writers, if invited at all, sat at the bottom of the table, below the heads of publicity but above the hairdressers.
We identified seven paths to becoming a screenwriter—journalism, play writing, novel writing, television writing, film school and screenwriting as the only profession, other show business occupations, and unrelated careers. The fact that screenwriters come to the field from so many different types of work is significant because, as Billy Wilder suggested, there may be a unique ability to construct a screenplay that is impossible to predict based on the ability to do other forms of writing.
‘The literary Genius of William Shakespeare’ by Dean Keith Simonton
His contemporary Ben Johnson said that Shakespeare was not of an age, but for all time
He stood (and still stand) at the apex of the top segment of the spiritual triangle
Writers do not create in a bubble insulated from their personal lives or from the rest of the world. If anything, writers are actually more open than nonwriters to experiences and circumstances—events that often provide the content of their work. This event—content relationship is amply demontrated in the 37 plays attributed to William Shakespeare.
‘In search of the Writer’s Creative Process,’ by Todd Lubart
A particularly important aspect of text generation, according to Sharples, is the primary generator, or guiding idea from which the rest of the text will be developed. As William Faulkner put it, “With me a story usually begins with a single idea or memory or mental picture. The writing of the story is simply a matter of working up to that moment, to explain why it happened or what caused it to follow
There is probably no single ‘creative process’ that one can follow like a recipe to be sure to produce a creative product. Indeed, probably a multitude of paths can lead to a creative story (and an even greater number of paths can lead to a noncreative production). It may be possible, however, to identify the optimal process for a specific person to generate creative work given that individual’s background and cognitive and personality profile, and taking into account that person’s environment.