Being Truly Creative

Came across this excerpt from The Harvard Business Review (Dec. 1, 2015) while reading this pretty cool book I started, The Mental Game of Writing, which I thought was interesting and wanted to share with you:


     "What determines whether the ideas we generate are truly creative? Recent research of ours finds that one common factor often gets in the way: we tend to undervalue the benefits of persistence.
     In a series of experiments we observed that people consistently underestimated the number of ideas they could generate while solving a creative challenge. In one, we brought 24 university students into the laboratory during the week leading up to Thanksgiving and asked them to spend ten minutes coming up with as many ideas of dishes to serve at Thanksgiving dinner as they could. Then we had them predict how many more ideas they could generate if they persisted on the task for an additional ten minutes.
     On average, the students predicted they would be able to generate around 10 new ideas if they persisted. But we found that they were actually able to generate around 15 new ideas.
     Several similar follow-up studies we conducted produced the same result. We asked professional comedians to generate punch lines for a sketch comedy scene; adults to generate advertisement slogans for a product; and people to come up with tactics a charity organization could use to increase donations. In each of these experiments, participants significantly underestimated how many ideas they could generate while persisting with the challenge.
     Importantly, after each study we asked a separate group of people to rate the creativity of the participants' ideas. Across the majority of our studies we found that ideas generated while persisting were, on average, rated to be more creative than ideas generated initially. Not only did participants underestimate their ability to generate ideas while persisting, they underestimated their ability to generate their most creative ideas.
     Why do we underestimate the benefits of persistence? It's because creative challenges feel difficult. People often have the experience of feeling "stuck," being unsure of how to find a solution, or hitting a wall with one idea and having to start over again.
(...)
     [C]reative ideas take time. They are often generated after an initial period of thinking deeply about the problem, and exploring different possible solution paths."


And it's true! I've been working dutifully on the Morgana Trilogy every day after work, but coming up with scenes and dialogues and all that jazz that makes a book (I hope) fun to read--even if I've already made a detailed outline and everything!--is going much slower than I'd wanted.

OK, granted, writing 6000 words a day is a big challenge, even (I think) for a full-time writer, and my average 1500 words a day falls way short of that. So I'm afraid I may end up having to push back the publication date for Curse of the Fey after all T.T

I'll keep you posted soon in another entry.

In the meantime, let me know if you discover some amazing fantasy books!