What is creativity?
Who has it and how can I acquire it? Importantly, can it make me money?
The problem with writing this essay on creativity was evident the moment I mentioned it to anyone. The idea didn’t sound creative, or necessary. It sounded blobby and arbitrary, like the early strains of a lot of ideas. It could not be written efficiently. Plus, there was no promise that you, the reader, would even vibe.
So what was the point? Whenever I would tell anyone about it, I would doubt, stammer, fish around for meaning, apologize for wasting their time. If I’m honest, those feelings linger, as I write this. But there was that one day recently at the Lyric Opera. For a week, the Joffrey Ballet staged an adaptation here of Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.” The idea came from Cathy Marston, a British choreographer who made her name translating classics such as “Jane Eyre” and “Lolita” into the fluid assemblage of movements that make a recognizable ballet.
Not an obvious sort of literary adaptation.
In business-speak, it would require buy-in.
We sat at the back of the dark auditorium during a rehearsal, the seats empty except for a smatter of crew. Marston kept looking away, toward her production, as if it might fold up and head home if she didn’t keep an eye on it. That is how creative ideas can sometimes appear — fleeting and vaporous, in need of a creative vision to pin them to a wall just long enough to gather meaning and purpose. But she wasn’t really looking at much. The stage held a large, barren dance milieu, offering plenty of open space. Yet it was an expansiveness in service to the story of two migrant workers traveling California’s Salinas Valley during the Great Depression, telling each other of a dream to one day own their own expanse.
The cast was not dressed in tights but work shirts, and the part of Lennie (danced by Dylan Gutierrez), keeping with the character, came across as lumbering for ballet. If you stumbled in off the street, if you didn’t know exactly what you were looking at, Marston still got across Steinbeck’s contours — discarded women, fieldwork, vengeful mobs. You might even understand that the role of Lennie’s friend, George, was being played simultaneously by two similar-looking dancers, to capture the emotional split in George, who is loyal to Lennie, but moving on.
At center stage was an upright steel rail.
“What you see there is four benches,” Marston said, “a bamboo plank, horizontal boards that fly in and out, to suggest interiors, exteriors, sky. And that rail, that is obviously a tree.” Obviously.
“No, clearly it is! Also, those benches can be bushes. Sometimes farm machinery. I want to figure out the minimum I need to tell a story, which then forces me to think creatively.”
Which means taking the risk of not being understood.
Which leads to fishing around for meaning. Wasting time. Being blobby a while. Whittling and whittling. Holding fast to a vision. Having no clear point, until you do. A few decades ago, when Marston began staging literary classics as ballet, the idea was a bit gauche in dance circles. Storytelling through ballet was “not too cool,” she said, “because people were thinking abstractly then. But I went ahead, and in time got bolder and bolder, stripping away the (literary) work and thinking of what a story means to me.”
Eventually, contemporary ballet caught up to her.
But the risk of a truly creative idea can never be fine-tuned away.
“So when I hear people in the corporate world talking about creativity and storytelling — how what they’re really doing is ‘telling a story,’ how everything is about creativity and storytelling, how everything is narrative — I hear it and think: Do you actually know what it means to be creative? To tell a story? I think, no, I tell stories. It’s all a bit annoying.”
The problem with writing this essay on creativity started when I found myself reading a bunch of books that were either about creativity or dovetailed with the subject of people acting creatively. Curious about who had written other books about creativity, I found myself staring at the business and self-help section where creativity is a 12-step plan and innovation is the latest corporate must-have. I suppose I knew this would happen; I’ve been to an airport bookstore. For instance, the new Quincy Jones’ memoir, “12 Notes: On Life and Creativity” — which is great on the former and cloying on the latter — reads like a business seminar that came together on the fly. He tells about his father, who worked as a carpenter for the Jones Boys, a gang on the South Side in the 1930s (eventually run out of town by Al Capone). He tells about, as a boy, having his hand nailed onto a fence with a switchblade, then having an ice pick jabbed into his temple “because I didn’t have the right password to cross the street.” He writes of music becoming a survival mechanism.
I suspect what annoys Marston — and myself — about the way business gloms on to the language of creativity and imagination and storytelling is that, for creative people like Jones, the endpoint is rarely to sell something. Occasionally, the creative urge is as elemental as bread and water.
Then again, Jones’s book is full of self-help.
He begins by saying he’s often asked for the formula to success and there is no formula to a creative life and if anyone tells you there is, “they’re full of it.” But having said that: Here’s “the closest I will get to sharing my personal ‘formula.’ ” Which is best understood by chapter titles: “If You Can See It, You Can Be It,” “Sharpen Your Left Brain,” “Share What You Know,” etc. None of this is wrong — in fact, much is in line with research on creativity — though a bit too easy to seem useful, which Jones himself suggests.
Of course, smarter people than myself would tell you creativity can be conditioned for and coaxed out of anyone — a 2020 paper from a creativity lab at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence found brainstorming sessions where lots of ideas get just thrown out there and not judged for their quality are not especially fruitful, that some people offer few ideas but each one has a rich sense of freshness. A Columbia University study
John Mulaney, having just read Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography, becomes fixated on the singer’s fear of being a rich man in a poor-man’s shirt. Mulaney wonders if his persona needs to change. More important: Is he willing to go to the unknown places it might lead him to?
As Jeff Tweedy of Wilco put it in a song: If the whole world’s singing your songs And all of your paintings have been hung, Just remember what was yours Is everyone’s from now on. A creative person, in a sense, never entirely capitalizes.
published last month in the scientific journal Nature seemed to double down on this: Zoom meetings, in particular, appear to smother the flourishing of original thought.
The goal of the research is to optimize creativity — presumably for business people, whom other studies have found are resistant to innovation. In fact, to remedy this, the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia just spun off a School of Business Innovation. Indeed, you might argue the study of creative thought often feels now like a cornerstone of contemporary business schools. Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management offers a six-week online course detailing “how design and creativity impact business,” with a pamphlet promising, “Creativity is a powerful business asset” and companies that “foster creativity enjoy a 1.5x greater market share.”
Creativity itself, however, rarely offers clear dividends.
In “Inventor of the Future,” an upcoming biography of architect and futurist Buckminster Fuller, by Oak Park author Alec Nevala-Lee, there’s the story of a despondent young Fuller wandering the Lake Michigan waterfront one Thanksgiving night, feeling like a failure, unsure of his worth and uncertain of his vision. He thinks about suicide. Then he has, what Nevala-Lee calls, “a blinding revelation.” He decides that he belongs “to the universe,” and his significance will “forever remain obscure” to himself. In other words, it is the fate of a creative soul to create despite never fully knowing the worth of their work.
Or as Jeff Tweedy of Wilco put it in a song:
If the whole world’s singing your songs
And all of your paintings have been hung,
Just remember what was yours
Is everyone’s from now on.
A creative person, in a sense, never entirely capitalizes.
When I spoke to New York Times journalist Matt Richtel about the value of creativity, he said my unease over businesspeople preaching the gospel of creativity somewhat misses the point. His new book, “Inspired: Understanding Creativity,” is partly on the way people find “immense joy from the creative process itself, which is mostly disconnected from the real value of creativity to many people.” He said the book is “an argument for allowing yourself the freedom of letting ideas in without judgment” and partly rooted in the research of neuroscientists and sociologists. He described the 21st century, our contemporary age, as “our most creative period, for good and ill. Creativity is not good or bad or moral or amoral but depends on how that creativity gets used, and research bears out that when you have a lot of congregations talking similar things, you get the kind of creativity seen in Harlem, Rome, Jerusalem. We have it now, because in a digital world there are no borders.” You can access to centuries of art, music, film, literature, from every inch of the globe; you have access to artists themselves, if only through Instagram. Finding somebody, anybody, who is creatively simpatico no longer needs to be a lonesome, solitary slog.
Still, some of this sounded triumphant, right on the cusp of self-help.
Until Richtel added, “but yes, the language around this stuff can so co-opt, and even mock, creativity that it can be hard to separate the innovation from the marketing. It can feel gross.”
Because creativity is inherently personal.
One of the most useful, straightforward readings lately of day-to-day creativity is devoid of research: “Sicker in The Head: More Conversations About Life and Comedy,” by filmmaker Judd Apatow, is a series of casual conversations with musicians (Tweedy, The Who’s Roger Daltrey) and talk show hosts (Jimmy Kimmel, Gayle King) and many others, but no surprise, Apatow’s chats become especially poignant around comedians. If there’s a theme, it would be gnawing doubt and the way that the history of creativity whispers in our ears: Bowen Yang of “Saturday Night Live” describes voiding an MCAT test in the middle of taking it, recalling how Steve Carell stopped his own LSAT test and decided to take a risk on the creative life. John Mulaney, having just read Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography, becomes fixated on the singer’s fear of being a rich man in a poor-man’s shirt. Mulaney wonders if his persona needs to change. More important: Is he willing to go to the unknown places it might lead him to?
Reading Apatow’s book, I thought about something else I had recently read, “Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand,” by John Markoff, a biography of the Rockford native who created the once ubiquitous Whole Earth Catalog, founded one of the earliest social media networks, dropped LSD with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters of San Francisco and generally became a cultural Forrest Gump.
Like many of the creatives in “Sicker in the Head,” Brand found a revelation of purpose — albeit one that put him on the wrong side of his conservative, well-to-do parents home in Illinois. His father, who was partly subsidizing his move to San Francisco in the 1960s, was not thrilled with the bohemians and artists that constituted Brand’s new circle on the West Coast. He called them moochers, offering a (particularly poor) example of where his son was headed if he kept this up: He wrote to his son to remember that Vincent van Gogh died penniless, only to achieve immortality long after he could make a buck.
That sounded good to Brand.
He had long felt Rockford was becoming “alien” to his own imagination. He preferred San Francisco, where he made endless connections and, as The New York Times’ Richtel said about creatively vibrant places, “there are more dots to connect, which in some ways is creativity itself — paying attention and seeing and then connecting all of those dots.”
Does that sound like business school?
In a way, it does. Jack Goncalo, a longtime experimental psychologist and professor of business administration for University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said he’s become “something of a nerd” on the subject of how thinking and research about creativity gets often associated these days with business schools and business literature. He explained that research on creativity emerged in the 1950s, but “found a lot of pushback because people assumed creativity equaled genius. We had IQ tests — pick the smartest person in the room and that’s the most creative person. Except no, researchers found IQ will only predict creativity to a point.” As Richtel’s book illustrates (partly with research from Goncalo), smart is good, but openness and curiosity are better.
The traits of creative people would become the focus of research. Tolerance of ambiguity was a major one.
Then in the late 1970s, psychologist Teresa Amabile at Stanford University offered evidence that situation matters, that we might be able to alter the conditions (financial incentives, personal incentives) that encourage people to be more creative and contribute better ideas.
Her research, mostly centered on office culture, became influential, and she ended up at the Harvard Business School.
Goncalo’s own 20 years of research into the characteristics of creativity pick up from there — evaluating what is considered creative, studying biases behind how creative ideas get endorsed, looking at what makes people in groups become creative, and what are the consequences of their creativity. He’s even looked at how the hairdo of the person pitching a fresh idea affects the way their creativity gets valued.
All of which sounds to me, again, in a strictly business sense, somewhat contradictory to the freedom of true creativity, which is not efficient, doesn’t always scale, exposes its creator and appears improbable. And guess what? That’s also what Goncalo hears from businesses.
“The irony is that, regardless of how much they talk about creativity, they often don’t want it,” he said. “They don’t appreciate it. Being creative might suggest leadership, but corporations don’t want creative people in top roles — ‘We like you, but we don’t want you in charge.’ Creative people are unpredictable. Companies seem to be saying, ‘We want creativity, which leads to profit, but we want creativity to be predictable and bounded by our rules.’ And in the end, with creativity, they don’t get to decide that.”
The problem with writing an essay on creativity
is the subject is tangled and shapeless, even for those who would like to give it order and shape. We could go on here forever. So I’ll just leave you with this image: Composer Thomas Newman, sitting in the back of the Lyric Opera before a rehearsal for “Of Mice and Men.” He’s known for his movie scores — “The Shawshank Redemption,” “Finding Nemo,” “Skyfall.” He’s been nominated for 15 Academy Awards, though he’s never written for ballet. He had felt “slightly terrified” about the job, though he also understands the quiet tyranny of expectations.
For decades, he lived in the shadow of more famous composers in his family: His father, Alfred Newman, wrote the scores for “All About Eve,” “The Mark of Zorro,” “Miracle on 34th Street,” among many other Hollywood classics; his cousin is the iconoclastic songwriting legend Randy Newman. Thomas Newman described himself as socially shy, and, for a long while, creatively timid.
“Until one day, I thought, ‘No one is listening. Who am I trying to please? No one cares.’ So plow forward. It was hard. But there, right there, that was the beginning of me creatively.”