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In a discussion with Scientific American Mind executive editor Mariette DiChristina, three noted experts on creativity, each with a very different perspective and background, reveal powerful ways to unleash your creative self.
John Houtz is a psychologist and professor at Fordham University. His most recent book is The Educational Psychology of Creativity (Hamptom Press, 2002).
Julia Cameron is an award-winning poet, playwright and filmmaker. Her book The Artist's Way (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2002) has sold more than three million copies worldwide. Her latest book is The Writing Diet.
Robert Epstein is a visiting scholar at the University of California, San Diego. Contributing editors for Scientific American Mind and former editor in chief of Psychology Today, Epstein has written several books on creativity, including The Big Book of Creativity Games (McGraw-Hill, 2000).
Mariette DiChristina: Let’s start by talking about what has drawn each of you to the study of creativity. What’s so fascinating about it?
John Houtz: There’s so much power in a new idea taking shape and changing the way people live and act. Often the rest of us are in awe, or we are even afraid of a new idea, and sometimes our fears spur us to learn more about it. In addition to what some academics call Big Creativity or “Big C”—profound ideas that sometimes change the world—there is what we call the “little c” type of creativity: the everyday problem solving that we all do. The bottom line is that we’d all like to be more creative. We’d all like to be able to solve our problems in a better way. We don’t like being frustrated. We don’t like having obstacles in our path.
Julia Cameron: What drew me to working on my creativity was running into a couple of bumps. I had had a blessed decade in my 20s, and then when I got to my 30s I felt thwarted. I was writing movies and selling them to studios, but they weren’t getting made. I needed to find a way to maintain equilibrium and optimism in the face of creative despair. I fought my despair with what I call “morning pages”—three pages of longhand writing about anything: “I don’t like the way Fred talked to me at the office”; “I need to get the car checked”; “I forgot to buy kitty litter.” They don’t look like they have anything to do with creativity, but in fact, as we put these worries, which are sort of a daily soundtrack for most of us, down on the page, we are suddenly much more alert, aware, focused and available to the moment. And we begin to see that we have many creative choices. As I wrote those pages, new ideas began to walk in. Over time, I began to share the morning-pages technique with other people.
Robert Epstein: My interest in creativity started in a peculiar way—while I was working with pigeons at Harvard in the 1970s. I was intrigued by the fact that they always did things I hadn’t taught them, and I wanted to know where the new behavior was coming from. I began teaching them different things systematically and then placing them in new situations and watching new behavior emerge. There was an orderly relation between what I had taught and the new behavior, and eventually I discovered principles or laws that allowed me to predict the new behavior, literally moment to moment. Eventually I began similar research with children, and then with adult humans, and found that those laws, somewhat tweaked, were still helpful. I came to believe that the creative process in individuals is orderly and predictable every moment in time. At some point I developed tests to see whether people have the competencies they need for expressing creativity, and then I developed games and exercises to boost creativity. I think that the fact that creativity is orderly is good news, because it means we can all tap into this rich potential we all have.
Cameron: I, too, have found the creative process to be teachable and trackable. I teach people three simple tools, and anyone using those tools has what might be called an awakening. They become much more alert; they become much more friendly in interacting with people—much less threatened by change.
Houtz: I think that some of the techniques Julia teaches are similar to the competencies Robert has uncovered. Perhaps, Robert, you might explain what those competencies are.
Epstein: There are four different skill sets, or competencies, that I’ve found are essential for creative expression. The first and most important competency is “capturing”—preserving new ideas as they occur to you and doing so without judging them. Your morning pages, Julia, are a perfect example of a capturing technique. There are many ways to capture new ideas. Otto Loewi won a Nobel Prize for work based on an idea about cell biology that he almost failed to capture. He had the idea in his sleep, woke up and scribbled the idea on a pad but found the next morning that he couldn’t read his notes or remember the idea. When the idea turned up in his dreams the following night, he used a better capturing technique: he put on his pants and went straight to his lab!
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