creativity report essay

May 12, 2014

The Philosophy of Creativity

There is little that shapes the human experience as profoundly and pervasively as creativity. Creativity drives progress in every human endeavor, from the arts to the sciences, business, and technology.

By Scott Barry Kaufman

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

There is little that shapes the human experience as profoundly and pervasively as creativity. Creativity drives progress in every human endeavor, from the arts to the sciences, business, and technology. We celebrate and honor people for their creativity, identifying eminent individuals, as well as entire cultures and societies, in terms of their creative achievements. Creativity is the vehicle of self-expression and part of what makes us who we are. One might therefore expect creativity to be a major topic in philosophy, especially since it raises such a wealth of interesting philosophical questions, as we will soon see. Curiously, it isn’t.

To be sure, some of the greatest philosophers in history have been taken with the wonder of creativity. To name just few examples: Plato has Socrates say, in certain dialogues, that when poets produce truly great poetry, they do it not through knowl- edge or mastery, but rather by being divinely “inspired”—literally, breathed into— by the Muses, in a state of possession that exhibits a kind of madness. Aristotle, in contrast, characterized the work of the poet as a rational, goal-directed activity of making (poeisis), in which the poet employs various means (such as sympathetic characters and plots involving twists of fate) to achieve an end (of eliciting various emotions in the audience). Kant conceived of artistic genius as an innate capacity to produce works of “exemplary originality” through the free play of the imagination, a process which does not consist in following rules, can neither be learned nor taught, and is mysterious even to geniuses themselves. Schopenhauer stressed that the greatest artists are distinguished not only by the technical skill they employ in the production of art, but also by the capacity to “lose themselves” in the experience of what is beautiful and sublime. Nietzsche saw the greatest feats of creativity, exemplified in the tragic poetry of ancient Greece, as being born out of a rare cooperation between the “Dionysian” spirit of ecstatic intoxication, which imbues the work with vitality and passion, and the “Apollonian” spirit of sober restraint, which tempers chaos with order and form. This is just the barest glimpse of what each of these philosophers had to say about creativity, and many other figures could be added to their number.

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Nevertheless, while some of the topics explored by earlier thinkers have come to occupy a central place in philosophy today—such as freedom, justice, conscious- ness, and knowledge—creativity is not among them. Philosophy has seen some very important work on creativity in the last few decades, but not nearly at the rate that we see for subjects of comparable range and importance. Indeed, “the philosophy of creativity” is still a neologism in most quarters—just as, for example, “the philosophy of action” and “the philosophy of music” were not too long ago.

In contrast, psychology has seen a definite surge of interest in creativity. In 1950, J. P. Guilford gave a presidential address at the American Psychological Association calling for research on the topic. And the field soon took off with waves of research investigating the traits and dispositions of creative personalities; the cognitive and neurological mechanisms at play in creative thought; the motivational determinants of creative achievement; the interplay between individual and collective creativity; the range of institutional, educational, and environmental factors that enhance or inhibit creativity; and more. Today, the blossoming of this field can be seen in the flurry of popular writing reporting on its results; an official division of the American Psychological Association on the psychology of aesthetics, creativity, and the arts (Division 10); numerous academic conferences; multiple peer-reviewed journals; several textbooks; and a growing number of undergraduate and graduate courses all devoted to the psychology of creativity. According to one historical overview, creativity has been studied by nearly all of the most eminent psychologists of the 20th century, and “the field can only be described as explosive.”

The swell of interest in the science of creativity is an inspiring example for the philosophy of creativity, but more importantly, it offers a resource that philosophers should be mindful of as they pursue this effort. Unfortunately, philosophers writing on creativity have sometimes tended to ignore the scientific literature. In some cases, they have gone so far as to claim—after citing just a few studies—that creativity is by its very nature unpredictable and therefore beyond the scope of science. Although the question of whether creativity is explicable is a philosophical question, it is not one that is impervious to empirical work. After all, anyone who declares from the armchair that something cannot be explained is liable to be refuted in the event that researchers do find ways to uncover explanations. The question of whether creativity can be explained empirically is itself, at least partly, an empirical question.

In fact, a number of issues arise at the nexus between philosophy and psychology and are handled best with contributions from both. This interdisciplinary approach is embraced by a new school of creativity researchers who are part of much broader trend toward dialogue and collaboration between scientifically-minded philosophers and philosophically-minded scientists. And the essays in this volume illustrate numerous ways in which the exchange can be fruitful, as philosophers draw on scientific research and scientific work is informed by philosophical perspectives. Below, we present a bird’s-eye view of these chapters and the themes and issues they explore.

The Concept of Creativity

Perhaps the most fundamental question for any study of creativity, philosophical or otherwise, is What is creativity? The term “creative” is used to describe three kinds of things: a person, a process or activity, or a product, whether it is an idea in someone’s mind or an observable performance or artifact. There is an emerging consensus that a product must meet two conditions in order to be creative. It must be new, of course, but since novelty can be worthless (as in a meaningless string of letters), it must also be of value. (Researchers sometimes express this second condition by saying a product must be “useful,” “appropriate,” or “effective.”) This definition is anticipated, in a way, by Immanuel Kant, who viewed artistic genius as an ability to produce works that are not only original—“since there can be original nonsense”— but also “exemplary.”

In chapter 1, Bence Nanay argues that creativity is primarily an attribute not of products, but of mental processes. Some have suggested that what makes a mental process creative is the use of a certain kind of functional or computational mecha- nism, such as the recombination of old ideas or the transformation of one’s concep- tual space. Against this view, Nanay offers what he calls an experiential account of creativity. He contends that what is distinctive about the creative mental process is not any functional/computational mechanism, but the way in which it is experienced. In particular, the process yields an idea that the creator experiences as one she hadn’t taken to be possible before.

Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art

One might suppose that if creativity has been understudied in philosophy at large, this couldn’t be so when philosophers are focused on art in particular. Art was long thought to have a monopoly on human creativity; it is still the paradigm of a creative domain, as “creative” is sometimes used more or less as a synonym for “artistic” and, at least in modern times, artists are disparaged when seen as derivative and praised for originality. But while the philosophy of art has been concerned with such issues as the definition, interpretation, and ontology of art, it has tended not to reflect on the artist as a creator, or the artist’s labors as a creative process, or the work of art as an expression of creativity. Thus Gaut and Livingston observe that “[a]lthough the creation of art is a topic that should be a central one for aesthetics, it has been comparatively neglected in recent philosophical writing about art.”

Gregory Currie brings the issue of creativity to the fore in chapter 2, where he examines the popular idea that eminently creative works of literature provide insight into the workings of the human mind. Many advocates of this view write as if its truth were self-evident. Currie suggests that it is not, that indeed there is little evidence in its favor, and he considers how the claim might be tested. Recent experi- mental studies by Oatley and colleagues look promising in this regard, but Currie suggests that their results so far provide very weak evidence at best. In the absence of better evidence, Currie puts a new spin on the debate by emphasizing the creativ- ity that goes into producing such great works of fiction. Are there aspects of literary creativity that should reliably lead to insights about the mind? He considers two such aspects—the institutions of literary production and the psychology of literary creativity—and suggests that in both cases, there are some grounds for thinking that literary creativity is not reliably connected with the production of insight.

Noël Carroll brings another dimension of creativity into view in chapter 3. Although he agrees that we should attend to the creative activities of the artist, he suggests that we should also acknowledge the contribution of the audience. For in order for the artist to accomplish the effects to which she aspires, Carroll argues, the audience must creatively cooperate with what the artist has initiated. He explores how audiences co-create artworks through the play of imagination. Rather than treating the imagination as if it were a single monolithic phenomenon, however, he identifies and analyzes several different imaginative activities that are engaged in response to a variety of artworks, such as reasoning counterfactually, filling-in unspecified content, constructing story-worlds around fictional objects, mentally simulating characters’ experiences and points of view, and freely devising and play- ing with different meanings, interpretations, and unifying themes. By means of these activities, Carroll suggests, it is ultimately the audience’s contribution that makes a work of art “work.”

In chapter 4, Christopher Peacocke raises interesting questions for aesthetics that bear upon the study of creativity. While philosophers have long debated the question of what makes something a work of art, Peacocke asks: What makes a work an example of a particular artistic style? He suggests that answering this question is a precondition for research on creativity in musical composition. Just as researchers who study perception understand that we cannot account for how the content of a perception is computed without specifying what the content is, Peacocke suggests that we cannot explain how a composer creates in his particular style unless we identify what is distinctive about that musical style. Using the example of the Romantic style of music, Peacocke’s approach draws on the perception of expressive action in combination with an account of what is involved in hearing emotion and other mental states in music. The account can link the phenomenology of musi- cal perception with the ideas and ideals of the Romantic movement. He notes that by changing various parameters in the account, we can explain what is variously distinctive about impressionist music, expressionist music, and some neoclassical composing in the style of Stravinsky.

Ethics and Value Theory

One thing that makes creativity such a gripping topic is that we cannot fully under- stand ourselves without taking it into account. Creativity seems to be linked to our very identity; it is part of what makes us who we are both as human beings and individuals. With regard to the latter, each of us can ask, “What makes me who I am (as an individual)?” and we might wonder whether the answer has something to do with creativity.

According to an ancient and still influential view, the self (one’s life) is some kind of dramatic or artistic performance. Exploring this idea in chapter 5, Owen Flanagan notes that there are metaphysical and logical questions about whether and how self-creation and self-constitution are possible. But he points out that there are also normative questions associated with the idea that life is a performance and the self is something that both emerges in and is constituted by that performance. Are there norms or standards that apply to self-constituting performances, and if so, what are they? Flanagan examines three contemporary psychopoetic conceptions of person—“day-by-day persons,” “ironic persons,” and “strong poetic persons”—in order to explore potential normative constraints on “performing oneself.” Flanagan’s provocative paper has implications for a number of diverse views in philosophy and psychology, from Jerome Bruner’s narrative theory of “self-making stories” to David Velleman’s paradox of self-constitution.

In chapter 6, Matthew Kieran asks what it is to be a creative person, and whether it involves a kind of virtue or excellence of character. He notes that there is a minimal sense according to which being creative means nothing more than having the ability to produce novel and worthwhile artifacts. Yet, he argues, there is a richer sense of the term that presupposes agential insight, mastery, and sensitivity to reasons in bringing about what is aimed at. A stroke victim who reliably produces beautiful patterns as a byproduct of his actions is not creative in the richer sense in which an artist who aims to produce them and could have done so differently is. Is creativity in this richer sense ever more than just a skill? In the light of suggestive empirical work, Kieran argues that motivation is central to exemplary creativity. Exemplary creativity, he argues, involves intrinsic motivation and is a virtue or excellence of character. We not only praise and admire individuals whose creative activity is born from a passion for what they do but, other things being equal, we expect them to be more reliably creative across different situations than those who are extrinsically motivated. This is consistent with the recognition that intrinsic motivation is not required to be creative and people’s creative potentials differ. Creativity in people will flourish when intrinsic motivation is foregrounded, with the relevant values and socioeconomic structures lining up appropriately. It tends to wither when they do not (unless a person’s creativity, like Van Gogh’s, is exceptionally virtuous).

Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science

In chapter 7, Simon Blackburn briefly remarks on the history of the idea—voiced by Plato, echoed by philosophers and artists in the Romantic tradition, and still present in the popular imagination—that creativity involves something mystical or supernatural. Against this notion, Blackburn draws on findings of modern psy- chology to offer a tamer view. He argues that even the most extraordinary creative achievements are the result of ordinary cognitive processes.

In chapter 8, Dustin Stokes ventures to clarify exactly what the relation is between creativity and imagination. In his view, imagination is important for even the most minimally creative thought processes. This would be a pointless tautology if “imagination” just means (the capacity for) creativity. The key, then, is to identify what imagination is such that it is not the same thing as creativity but still essential for it nonetheless. As Stokes notes, few philosophers have thought through the distinction between imagination and creativity, and few psychologists have directly tested the difference between the two constructs. While grounding his paper in contemporary philosophy, Stokes also draws on cognitive and developmental psy- chology to identify the architectural features common to genius-level creativity, as well as more everyday forms of creativity. He starts by making a distinction between “truth-boundedness”—cognitive states that function to accurately represent the world—and “non truth-bound” states that do not function to accurately represent the world, but instead facilitate the manipulation of the information they represent. He argues that richly creative achievements in the arts and sciences, as well as more everyday breakthroughs, draw on cognitive manipulation processes. Stokes concludes that imagination serves the cognitive manipulation role and is typified by four features: It is non truth-bound, under immediate voluntary control, engages with affective and motivational systems, and drives inference and decision- making. Stokes’s essay has implications for a number of philosophical problems relating to imagination and fiction, as well as psychological issues relating to the role of conscious, deliberate thought in creativity.

On the latter question, there is a tendency that appears in various forms through- out intellectual and artistic history to regard conscious thought as irrelevant or even inimical to creativity. In the classical story where creative inspiration comes to an artist from an external muse, the artist’s consciousness is not the source, but rather the recipient, of creative work. The same is true when an insight is said to emerge from the unconscious mind, showing up in consciousness as a kind of pleasant surprise (Eureka!). There is also the popular perception that conscious thought impedes creativity; thus the familiar accounts of artists using drugs, alcohol, or other trance-inducing practices as a means of surrendering conscious control and giving free rein to the creative unconscious.

In chapter 9, however, psychologists Roy Baumeister, Brandon Schmeichel, and C. Nathan DeWall suggest that consciousness deserves more creative credit. They present evidence to support the notion that creativity requires an interactive collaboration of conscious and unconscious processes. In their view, creative impulses originate in the unconscious but require conscious processing to edit and integrate them into a creative product. They review psychological experiments showing that creativity declines sharply when consciousness is preoccupied (for example, improvising jazz guitar while counting backward by six, or drawing with colored pencils while listening closely to music). They conclude that the research contradicts the popular view in both psychology and philosophy that consciousness is irrelevant or an impediment to the creative process. Instead, they believe that the research fits well with recently emerging understandings of the special capabilities of conscious thought.

Earlier, when we discussed the potential connection between creativity and self-understanding, we were concerned with what makes each of us who we are as individuals. But we can also ask, more generally, what makes us who we are as a species, and there is a long tradition of Western thought that seeks to understand what makes us human in terms of what makes us distinctively human, and set apart from other animals in particular. Whatever we think of the existing proposals that highlight our allegedly unique possession of reason, language, and metacognition, creativity seems as good a candidate as any. The tricky question, of course, is how did creativity evolve in humans?

In chapter 10, Elizabeth Picciuto and Peter Carruthers provide an integrated evolutionary and developmental account of the emergence of distinctively human creative capacities. Their main thesis is that childhood pretend play (e.g., imagining battling spaceship invaders) is a uniquely human adaptation that functions in part to enhance adult forms of creativity.

In support of their view, they draw on a wide literature spanning evolutionary, cognitive, and developmental psychology. They begin by reviewing evolutionary accounts of what makes humans unique, including our language, enhanced working memory, culture, and convergent and divergent thinking. They consider pretend play as a distinctively human ability, noting its universality, and showing that nearly all children, cross-culturally, engage in it. They review existing views of the func- tional roles of pretend play, including the facilitation of social schemata and theory of mind. Unconvinced by these accounts, they argue instead that pretend play facilitates creative thought—a process that involves both defocused attention and cogni- tive control. They review a number of common capacities of both pretend play and creativity, including generativity, supposing, bypassing the obvious, and selection of valuable but less obvious ideas. They conclude that childhood pretense paves the way for creativity in adulthood. This chapter is a fine example of how philosophers can contribute to our understanding of issues that are also pursued by scientists, in this case concerning the emergence of the capacities we have as human beings to pretend and create.

In our technologically driven age, it is not uncommon to think of what makes us human in contrast not only to other animals but also to machines, computers, and robots. Artificial intelligence is becoming ever more sophisticated, and some programs already display certain marks of creativity, appearing in major art galleries and garnering patents. These are machines whose products are both valuable and new. In addition to these two standard conditions, Margaret Boden maintains in chapter 11 that a creative product is one that is surprising as a result of the combina- tion, exploration, or transformation involved in producing it. She gives examples of artificial intelligence systems that fit all of these criteria, and raises this intriguing question: Could a computer-based system ever “really” be creative? This leads to interesting philosophical issues about what constitutes “real” creativity. With some qualification, she argues that real creativity involves autonomy, intentionality, valu- ation, emotion, and consciousness. But as she points out, the problem is that each one of these elements is controversial in itself, even if we don’t consider it in rela- tion to creativity and/or artificial intelligence. Boden concludes that we will not be able to understand whether creativity and artificial intelligence are contradictions in terms until we have clear and credible accounts of all these matters. Her chapter thus highlights the important role that philosophy can play in both psychology and artificial intelligence by further clarifying the constructs involved.

Philosophy of Science

Today, it’s understood that creativity can be at work in virtually every human pursuit. In the past, however, thinking about creativity tended to be much less inclu- sive. Once again, Kant is a telling example. Having defined genius as the capacity to produce ideas that are both original and exemplary (i.e., “creative” in our terms), he asserted that genius could only be manifested in the fine arts.20 Scientists were not geniuses because they follow the set procedures of the scientific method rather than giving free rein to their imaginations. Even Isaac Newton, whom Kant called the “great man of science,” was not deemed to be a creative genius. Nor, for that matter, was Kant himself!

Despite the much broader scope that we now accord to creativity, there is still a remnant of the Kantian intuition in popular stereotypes of the creative person that are more strongly associated with the artist than with anyone else. In chapter 12, psychologist Dean Keith Simonton argues, in effect, that there is something right about this Kantian tendency, as he explores the question: How does creativity differ between domains? In so doing, he integrates two philosophical traditions. The first tradition, stemming back to Auguste Comte, is concerned with whether the sciences can be arrayed into a hierarchy. The second tradition, which includes Alexander Bain and William James, concerns whether creativity and discovery involve a pro- cess of blind-variation and selective-retention (BVSR). The key part for this issue is blind-variation. Roughly, a process is “blind” to the extent that the probability of it’s generating a certain idea is not a function of that idea’s utility or value. A completely random procedure would be an example, though not the only example, of a blind process. Drawing on psychological research, Simonton shows that a valid hierarchy can be formed based on objective criteria regarding creative ideas, products, and persons. In place of Kant’s stark dichotomy between the sciences and the fine arts, Simonton’s hierarchy comprises a wide range of disciplines in the sciences, the humanities, and the arts. Where a discipline falls in the hierarchy depends on the extent to which practitioners need to engage in BVSR processes in order to make contributions that are creative (new and useful). Domains at the top of the hierarchy (i.e., sciences) rely more on sighted variations, whereas domains at the bottom (i.e., arts) depend more on blind variations. Simonton also shows that a discipline’s position in the hierarchy depends on the characteristics and developmental experi- ences of the creator. Simonton’s chapter is an intriguing synthesis of issues in both psychology and philosophy regarding the classification of creativity across domains.

Philosophy of Education (and Education of Philosophy)

Our final two chapters deal with the teaching and learning of creativity. It is not unusual to find people who assume that creativity is an innate capacity that cannot be taught or learned. Edward Young and Immanuel Kant were part of a long tradi- tion of thinkers who held such a view, and in arguing for it, they did us the service of exposing the kinds of assumptions that make it seem compelling. In chapter 13, Berys Gaut identifies two key arguments: The first is that learning requires imitation, which is incompatible with creativity; the second is that learning consists in following rules, which is incompatible with creativity. After criticizing these arguments, Gaut develops a positive case for the teachability of creativity, based on the teachability of the kinds of abilities and motivations that are involved in creativity. There is a sense in which Gaut’s question can be settled empirically: We can show that creativity can be taught simply by pointing to cases where it has been taught. Gaut himself discusses such examples as they occur in mathematics and fiction writing, noting in particular how heuristics or rules of thumb are used in these domains. But while such cases may suffice to show that creativity can be taught, Gaut further enriches our understanding by explaining how this is possible despite the common misconceptions that may seem to rule it out. Having given a philosophical account of how creativity can be taught, he ends by applying his analysis to the teaching of creativity within philosophy itself.

With this last theme, Gaut has a kindred spirit in Alan Hájek, the author of our final chapter. In fact, between the two of them, we have an instance of “multiples” in creativity research, cases where people working independently arrive at the same discoveries at about the same time.21 Although Gaut and Hájek were unaware of each other’s essays before submitting them for this volume, they converged on an interesting proposal—that by using various heuristics, philosophers can enhance their abilities to make valuable contributions to their field, including ideas that are distinctively creative.

As Hájek notes, it is said that anyone of average talent can become a strong chess player by learning and internalizing certain chess heuristics—“castle early,” “avoid isolated pawns,” and so on. Analogously, Hájek suggests, philosophy has a wealth of heuristics—philosophical heuristics—although they have not been nearly so well documented and studied. Sometimes these take the form of useful heuristics for generating counterexamples, such as “check extreme cases.” Sometimes they sug- gest ways of generating new arguments out of old ones, as in “arguments involving possibility can often be recast as arguments involving time, or space.” Sometimes they provide templates for positive arguments (e.g., ways of showing that something is possible). Hájek offers this chapter partly as an introduction to a larger project of identifying and evaluating philosophical heuristics, illustrating them with numer- ous examples from the philosophical literature. This work is a creative contribution to the philosophy of education. And it offers insights for the philosophy of creativity too, as it shows in fine detail how, contrary to a common assumption, creativity can be compatible with and even enhanced by the following of rules.

We are thankful for the input, encouragement, and support of Taylor Carmen, Tamara Day, Michael Della Rocca, Milena Fisher, Eugene Ford, Nancy France, Don Garrett, Tamar Szabó Gendler, Lydia Goehr, Joy Hanson, Markus Labude, Rebecca McMillan, John Morrison, Emily Downing Muller, Fred Neuhouser, Carol Rovane, and our wonderful colleagues and students at Barnard College, Columbia University, and New York University. Special thanks to Liz Boylan, former provost of Barnard College, for generously sponsoring the conference we held on the philosophy of creativity in preparation for this volume. We thank film director Tao Ruspoli for making a video of the event, artists Jill Sigman and Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. “D.J. Spooky”) for their participation as special guests, and Geovanna Carrasco, Melissa Flores, and Emily Neil for their excellent work as research assistants. We thank Peter Ohlin, Lucy Randall, Stacey Victor, and their colleagues at Oxford University Press for helping us see this book to print. Last but not least, we are very grateful to our contributors for illustrating the value of interdisciplinary exchange, the intellectual richness of the philosophy of creativity, and the exciting possibilities for how this field can grow. We hope this volume helps to stimulate new insights, questions, and collaborations—new ways to illuminate (and perhaps even to exemplify) this magnificent facet of human life.

This was an excerpt from The Philosophy of Creativity, edited by Elliot Samuel Paul and Scott Barry Kaufman , now available on Amazon .

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100 Creative Essay Topics

An amazing number of writers look for the best creative writing prompts on a daily basis. These could be college students who were asked to write a fictional or narrative essay, published authors looking for their next big idea, or young people who want to explore something inspiring in their future work. Creativity is everything, and the success of any venture depends on the topic you’ve chosen. In 2020, many popular prompts have lost their novelty.

Usual stories about the journey that turned into disaster when you got lost and your things were all stolen, a secretary falling in love with her boss, a ghost-hunting adventure — this is no longer as interesting topic as it was ten years ago. Now, people look for newer and fresher ideas, but the logical question occurs: where to find them? Regardless of why you need creative prompts, we’re prepared to share some of them!

In Search of Creative Essay Topic: Best Tips

Let’s imagine that you’re writing a creative story or an essay. All you need is to trigger your inspiration, but what if today, your fantasy decided to take a break? No worries: there are some tips that could be useful if you’re stuck with picking topics:

• Brainstorm with your friends or family.  Thinking by yourself could be great, but if it doesn’t work, use someone else’s input. Meet up with friends or classmates and bounce topic ideas back and forth between each other. Maybe one of them will offer stunning creative writing ideas you could use.
• Play a game.  Close your eyes. Walk somewhere carefully, turn around a couple of times, then open your eyes and look around. Choose the first thing or person and create topic or essay idea around it. Beginners could face some difficulties at first, but the main thing is practice! After several awkward stories, your skill level will increase.
• Look through online lists.  There are many cool topics you could find online. People have developed lists specifically to satisfy writers’ needs, so check some of them out in our list just below.

100 Unique Creative Essay Prompts

We prepared 100 different topic examples for your future essay. Read through them all or sort them by category — maybe you’ll find something truly inspiring.

Extended Creative Essay Topics on Social Issues

Small tragedies are everywhere, wherever we look. A woman who smiles tiredly could be barely holding back her tears. A running girl is trying to make it home in time to protect her brother from their drunk uncle. Here are some similar ideas.

• Addiction : Daughter took her mother to live with her, but it turned out that the woman has serious psychological issues. She’s addicted to alcohol and she keeps bringing rubbish from streets into her room. The story of love and pain ensue.
• Euthanasia : Person is dying slowly and they ask their nurse for euthanasia. The laws forbid it, though, and the nurse is getting more and more torn about letting the patient suffer or following the law.
• World Chaos : Due to the deadly virus that spread all over the planet, no medicine is available. Character struggles with accepting the idea of this new world and its cruel rules.
• Bullying : The bullied girl gets fed up with the world around her, so she takes actions to ensure that nothing and no one can ever hurt her again.
• Kindness : The lonely woman has more money than she could ever spend. She decides that doing kind things is the only validation she can find, so she starts trying to make all people she meets happy.
• Gossip : Two young men dream about taking part in a reality show, but when it happens, they understand how many ugly lies are beneath it.
• Stalking : Man is being stalked by a woman, but no one takes him seriously… until it is too late.
• Indifference : A bird is lying in a puddle, dying, as people pass by with no care. Then, a girl notices it, and she takes it home to nurse it back to health.
• Discrimination : Young girl thinks she is aromantic and asexual, but her family and friends are all convinced that she just hasn’t found the right person yet.
• Harassment : Old but enthusiastic employee starts a new job, and he doesn’t understand why his boss hates him & tries to humiliate him at every turn… until he suddenly remembers about their shared past.

Creative Fantasy Essay Ideas

Some of the best creative writing assignments fall into fantasy category.

• World Peace : Something happened that resulted in peace all over the world. People are happy, animals are healthy, and there is no anger or hatred left. But something is not right, and slowly, unexpected problems begin to emerge.
• Prophesies : A woman named Julia desperately wants to become the president. She learns of the prophecy claiming that her country will be saved by the woman, but the problem is, the prophecy woman’s name is Hannah. Determined to make herself fit, Julia officially changes her name.
• Reincarnation : Two people in love keep being reborn. One of them remembers everything, but another one remains ignorant.
• Soulmates : People dream about their soulmates even before they meet them. Character A meets Character B, but while A is happy, B prefers to ignore him.
• World End : Terrible monsters are crawling all over the planet. The man not interested in survival survives, but when he is saddled with an orphaned child, his life suddenly gains new meaning.
• Time of Death : People know how soon they’ll die from the moment of their birth. Some of them accept it; others fight it.
• Secrets Exposed : Woman can tell people’s secrets just by looking at them. Sometimes it’s a blessing; other times, it is a curse.
• Divine Punishment:  Psychopath loses one of his senses every time he acts on his dark impulses.
• Forever and Ever : Character lives forever. At first, it was exciting, but now it is weighing heavily on them.
• Predictions : Whatever prediction this person makes, it comes true. Can they resist such terrible power?

Fiction Topics

How about creative writing topics in the genre of monster hunting or dark romance? Many writers find it fascinating because of the challenge involved. Here are some good prompts.

• Serial Killer : After hunting numerous victims down, a killer is stopped short by a red-haired girl he sees. He begins to stalk her, and in this process, he falls in love.
• Beloved Pet : Imagine you’re a pet living in the family who loves and coddles you. How does that feel?
• Unhealthy Relationship : Two narcissists hurt each other, and yet they can’t live without each other.
• Complex Relationship : Character A destroyed the life of Character B’s parents. Years later, they fall in love.
• Age Difference : Being in love with someone older hurts.
• Social Difference : He is rich, she is not. He’s ready to ignore the difference, but she isn’t.
• Taboo : An orphaned boy is adopted by new doting guardian, yet the feelings he develops for them are far from appropriate.
• Abduction : Two girls are abducted during New Year. They don’t know why they were taken, but gradually, they realize that they have a chance to start the whole new life.
• Unexpected Bonding : Two students are stuck in detention for fighting each other. But feelings start growing before they know it.
• Beauty : She was the definition of beauty, yet the more she loved, the more her beauty was destroyed.
• Toys : Child is sure her toys are dancing at night.
• In a Movie : Boy falls into the universe of his favorite movie.
• Rocks : You’re the rock that existed for centuries. What do you see?
• Speaking with animals:  The day you started understanding your pet.
• Love Hurts:  It causes physical pain.

Creative Journal Prompts for Essays

Basing your ideas on notes in journals is both creative and realistic.

• Character lost in the forest is trying to survive by writing.
• A journal is found on an empty island.
• From first love to disillusionment.
• Watching seasons change.
• Saving up for an expensive purchase.
• An imagined year of life day by day.
• Message to your future self.
• Description of nightmares.
• Every message sent to you on Facebook.
• Observing your love interest.
• Describing every hobby you ever had.
• Finding yourself in the past & writing about it.
• 5 awkward speeches.
• Watching your child grow.
• List what you’d buy if you had a million dollars.

Creative Humor Essays Topics

If you have great humor, take a look at these fun creative writing prompts.

• Write a tragedy made of random sentences from your online messages.
• Meeting your real muse: awkwardness ensues.
• Hiding your golden finger from everyone to avoid turning them into gold.
• Love letter for the first person you see.
• Meeting TV character.
• Interview that goes very wrong.
• The most shameful moment from your life.
• Stealing a painting & finding out it’s a copy.
• Being accidentally turned into a Barbie.
• Write short story where every word starts with the same letter.

Creative Essays Topics About Death

Death is painful, but it gives birth to many ideas for creative writing. Your essay will be engaging with these topics:

• Losing the loved one never gets easier.
• Keeping ashes of the deceased beloved close.
• Characters realize they are doomed to die every day.
• Character is preparing to commit suicide and is saying goodbye to family.
• A bloodthirsty creatures entices people to kill themselves.
• Speech on the grandfather’s funeral.
• Living in an empty apartment where happy voices of a family can still be heard.
• Every loss feels like dying: family, friends, pets.
• Character embraces death and cries happy tears upon being reunited with people they loved.
• Character gets tired of living and tries to die & discovers they are immortal.

Health and Medicine

Healthcare could be a category with lots of creative writing prompts for adults. Nail your essay with one of this topics.

• OCD woman tries to make sense of her life.
• Man with amnesia starts each day as a new life.
• A ghost haunts the hospital for a decade and observes what they see.
• Each time this girl recovers from panic attack, she feels like she was reborn.
• Create unique disease for your character & describe their life.
• Narrator reflects whether it’s better to live with pain or not live at all.
• A surgeon describes her surgeries & acknowledges she needs nothing else.
• A paranoid patient is convinced he’s dying and refuses to listen to doctors.
• The blind person seeing colors for the first time.
• Person fears being kidnapped & looks for poison just in case.

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Creative Essays Ideas About Dreams

Our dreams are a mix of reality and fantasy. These writing prompts for creative writing reflect it.

• Mother dreams of reuniting with her missing child. Years later, her dreams is realized.
• What you dreamed about yesterday will come true tomorrow.
• Contacting people through dreams.
• As soon as you have a dream, you know the opposite will happen in reality.
• A killer learned how to kill people via dreams.
• A person’s biggest dream is about realizing what their dream is.
• Having dreams costs money. Who will agree to have them?
• Only people who share dreams are allowed to get married.
• Life is fair: happy people only have nightmares while unhappy people have happy dreams.
• Cure against dreams: who would take it?

Creative Education Topics

A million creative writing essays topics could be based on education.

• Story of how time in college was the happiest in one’s life.
• A bully falling in love with their victim and trying to earn their forgiveness.
• What character sacrificed in order to afford tuition.
• After all she has been through, she finally got into the university of her dreams… and she hates it.
• A heartbreaking choice between working & studying.
• A teacher saying to a successful student: “I haven’t graduated with honors, so you won’t either.”
• School and I: it was hatred from the first sight.
• The time I fell asleep during my lesson.
• Having a crush on your teacher & coming to realize why it’s wrong.
• You are the director at made-up university: how would it look like?

Have Fun Writing With Creative College Essay Topics

If you’re having a bad day and cannot summon even a spark of creativity, we’re here to help you! Use an idea we offered above — just give it a good title. If you like it, then it is all that matters — you’ve already crossed half of the way toward absolute success. In case having a prompt is not enough and you still feel no inspiration, you could always leave it to us. 

We have amazing specialists whose creativity knows no boundaries: they could write a short fictional story, craft a quirky essay, or develop some personalized creative prompts for you. Share your request with us, supply us with all details, and we’ll make sure to fulfill every one of them. There is nothing wrong with asking for help, and we are always happy to provide it.

Can’t come up with a topic for you paper? We’ve prepared a collection of essay topics for you

Want to write a winning essay but lack experience? Browse our free essay samples

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How to Write a Creative Essay: Useful Tips and Examples

Essay creative writing is not always seen as fun by most students, but the realm of creative essays can offer an enjoyable twist. The inherent freedom in choosing a topic and expressing your thoughts makes this type of paper a creative playground. Engaging in composing a creative essay provides an opportunity to flex your creative muscles. Yet, if you're new to crafting compositions, it can pose a challenge. This article guides you through the steps to write an impressive creative essay, helping you navigate the process seamlessly. In a hurry? Our writing service is there for you 24/7, with guidance and practical help.

What Is a Creative Essay

A creative essay is a form of writing that goes beyond traditional academic structures, allowing the author to express themselves more imaginatively and artistically. Unlike formal essays, creative ones emphasize storytelling, personal reflection, and the exploration of emotions. They often incorporate literary elements such as vivid descriptions, dialogue, and poetic language to engage readers on a more emotional and sensory level. Follow our creative essay tips to experiment with style and structure, offering a unique platform to convey ideas, experiences, or perspectives in a captivating and inventive way.

To answer the question what does creative writing mean, it’s necessary to point out that it departs from traditional academic writing, offering a canvas for artistic expression and storytelling. It diverges from the rigid structure of formal writings, providing a platform for writers to infuse their work with imagination and emotion. In this genre, literary elements such as vivid descriptions and poetic language take center stage, fostering a more engaging and personal connection with the reader.

Unlike a poem analysis essay , this form of writing prioritizes narrative and self-expression, allowing authors to delve into their experiences and perspectives uniquely. It's a departure from the conventional rules, encouraging experimentation with style and structure. Creative essays offer a distinct avenue for individuals to convey ideas and emotions, weaving a tapestry that captivates and resonates with readers on a deeper, more sensory level.

Creative Writing Essay Outline Explained From A to Z

Moving on, let's delve into how to write a creative writing essay from s structural perspective. Despite the focus on creativity and imagination, a robust structure remains essential. Consider your favorite novel – does it not follow a well-defined beginning, middle, and end? So does your article. Before diving in, invest some time crafting a solid plan for your creative writing essay.

Creative Essay Introduction

In creative essay writing, the introduction demands setting the scene effectively. Begin with a concise portrayal of the surroundings, the time of day, and the historical context of the present scenario. This initial backdrop holds significant weight, shaping the atmosphere and trajectory of the entire storyline. Ensure a vivid depiction, employing explicit descriptions, poetic devices, analogies, and symbols to alter the text's tone promptly.

Creative Essay Body

The body sections serve as the engine to propel the storyline and convey the intended message. Yet, they can also be leveraged to introduce shifts in motion and emotion. For example, as creative writers, injecting conflict right away can be a powerful move if the plot unfolds slowly. This unexpected twist startles the reader, fundamentally altering the narrative's tone and pace. Additionally, orchestrating a fabricated conflict can keep the audience on edge, adding an extra layer of intrigue.

Creative Essay Conclusion

Typically, creative writers conclude the narrative towards the end. Introduce a conflict and then provide its resolution to tie up the discourse neatly. While the conclusion often doesn't lead to the story's climax, skilled writers frequently deploy cliffhangers. By employing these writing techniques, the reader is left in suspense, eagerly anticipating the fate of the characters without a premature revelation.

Creative Writing Tips

Every student possesses a distinct mindset, individual way of thinking, and unique ideas. However, considering the academic nature of creative writing essays, it is essential to incorporate characteristics commonly expected in such works, such as:

• Select a topic that sparks your interest or explores unique perspectives. A captivating subject sets the stage for an engaging paper.
• Begin with a vivid and attention-grabbing introduction. Use descriptive language, anecdotes, or thought-provoking questions to draw in your readers from the start.
• Clearly articulate the main idea or theme of your essay in a concise thesis statement. This provides a roadmap for your readers and keeps your writing focused.
• Use descriptive language to create a sensory experience for your readers. Appeal to sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell to enhance the imagery.
• Play with the structure of your content. Consider nonlinear narratives, flashbacks, or unconventional timelines to add an element of surprise and creativity.
• If applicable, develop well-rounded and relatable characters. Provide details that breathe life into your characters and make them memorable to the reader.
• Establish a vivid and immersive setting for your narrative. The environment should contribute to the overall mood and tone.
• Blend dialogue and narration effectively. Dialogue adds authenticity and allows characters to express themselves, while narration provides context and insight.
• Revisit your essay for revisions. Pay attention to the flow, coherence, and pacing. Edit for clarity and refine your language to ensure every word serves a purpose.
• Share your creative writing article with others and welcome constructive feedback. Fresh perspectives can help you identify areas for improvement and refine your storytelling.
• Maintain an authentic voice throughout your essay. Let your unique style and perspective shine through, creating a genuine connection with your audience.
• Craft a memorable conclusion that leaves a lasting impression. Summarize key points, evoke emotions, or pose thought-provoking questions to resonate with your readers.

Types of Creative Writing Essays

A creative writing essay may come in various forms, each offering a unique approach to storytelling and self-expression. Some common types include:

• Reflects the author's personal experiences, emotions, and insights, often weaving in anecdotes and reflections.

Descriptive 

• Focuses on creating a vivid and sensory-rich portrayal of a scene, person, or event through detailed descriptions.
• Tells a compelling story with a clear plot, characters, and often a central theme or message.

Reflective 

• Encourages introspection and thoughtful examination of personal experiences, revealing personal growth and lessons learned.

Expository 

• Explores and explains a particular topic, idea, or concept creatively and engagingly.

Persuasive 

• Utilizes creative elements to persuade the reader to adopt a particular viewpoint or take a specific action.

Imaginative 

• These creative writing papers allow for the free expression of imagination, often incorporating elements of fantasy, surrealism, or speculative fiction.

Literary Analysis

• Learning how to write a creative writing essay, analyze and interpret a piece of literature, and incorporate creativity to explore deeper meanings and connections.
• Blends personal experiences with travel narratives, offering insights into different cultures, places, and adventures.
• Focuses on creating a detailed and engaging portrait of a person, exploring their character, experiences, and impact on others.

Experimental 

• Pushes the boundaries of traditional essay structures, experimenting with form, style, and narrative techniques.
• Combines elements from different essay types, allowing for a flexible and creative approach to storytelling.

As you can see, there are many types of creative compositions, so we recommend that you study how to write an academic essay with the help of our extensive guide.

How to Start a Creative Writing Essay

Starting a creative writing essay involves capturing the reader's attention and setting the tone for the narrative. Here are some effective ways to begin:

• Pose a thought-provoking question that intrigues the reader and encourages them to contemplate the topic.
• Begin with a short anecdote or a brief storytelling snippet that introduces the central theme or idea of your essay.
• Paint a vivid picture of the setting using descriptive language, setting the stage for the events or emotions to unfold.
• Open with a compelling dialogue that sparks interest or introduces key characters, immediately engaging the reader in the conversation.
• Incorporate a relevant quotation or epigraph that sets the mood or provides insight into the essay's theme.
• Begin with a bold or intriguing statement that captivates the reader's attention, encouraging them to delve further into your essay.
• Present a contradiction or unexpected scenario that creates a sense of curiosity and compels the reader to explore the resolution.
• Employ a striking metaphor or simile that immediately draws connections and conveys the essence of your creative essay.
• Start by directly addressing the reader, creating a sense of intimacy and involvement right from the beginning.
• Establish the mood or atmosphere of your essay by describing the emotions, sounds, or surroundings relevant to the narrative.
• Present a dilemma or conflict that hints at the central tension of your essay, enticing the reader to discover the resolution.
• Start in the middle of the action, dropping the reader into a pivotal moment that sparks curiosity about what happened before and what will unfold.

Choose an approach to how to write a creative essay that aligns with your tone and theme, ensuring a captivating and memorable introduction.

Creative Essay Formats

Working on a creative writing essay offers a canvas for writers to express themselves in various formats, each contributing a unique flavor to the storytelling. One prevalent format is personal writing, where writers delve into their own experiences, emotions, and reflections, creating a deeply personal narrative that resonates with readers. Through anecdotes, insights, and introspection, personal essays provide a window into the author's inner world, fostering a connection through shared vulnerabilities and authentic storytelling.

Another captivating format is the narrative, which unfolds like a traditional story with characters, a plot, and a clear arc. Writers craft a compelling narrative, often with a central theme or message, engaging readers in a journey of discovery. Through vivid descriptions and well-developed characters, narrative articles allow for the exploration of universal truths within the context of a captivating storyline, leaving a lasting impression on the audience.

For those who seek to blend fact and fiction, the imaginative format opens the door to vivid exploration. This format allows writers to unleash their imagination, incorporating elements of fantasy, surrealism, or speculative fiction. By bending reality and weaving imaginative threads into the narrative, writers can transport readers to otherworldly realms or offer fresh perspectives on familiar themes. The imaginative essay format invites readers to embrace the unexpected, challenging conventional boundaries and stimulating creativity in both the writer and the audience. Check out our poetry analysis essay guide to learn more about the freedom of creativity learners can adopt while working on assignments. 

Creative Essay Topics and Ideas

As you become familiar with creative writing tips, we’d like to share several amazing topic examples that might help you get out of writer’s block:

• The enchanted garden tells a tale of blooms and whispers.
• Lost in time, a journey through historical echoes unfolds.
• Whispering winds unravel the secrets of nature.
• The silent symphony explores the soul of music.
• Portraits of the invisible capture the essence of emotions.
• Beyond the horizon is a cosmic adventure in stardust.
• Can dreams shape reality? An exploration of the power of imagination.
• The forgotten key unlocks doors to the past.
• Ripples in the void, an exploration of cosmic mysteries.
• Echoes of eternity are stories written in the stars.
• In the shadow of giants, unveils the unsung heroes.
• Can words paint pictures? An exploration of the artistry of literary expression.
• Whispers of the deep explore the ocean's hidden stories.
• Threads of time weave lives through generations.
• Do colors hold emotions? A journey of painting the canvas of feelings.
• The quantum quandary navigates the world of subatomic particles.
• Reflections in a mirror unmask the layers of identity.
• The art of silence crafts narratives without words.
• The ethereal dance explores movement beyond the visible.
• Can shadows speak? Unveiling stories cast in darkness.

Examples of Creative Writing Essays

We've added a couple of brief creative writing essays examples for your reference and inspiration.

Creative Writing Example 1: Admission Essay

Creative writing example 2: narrative essay.

What Are the Types of Creative Writing Essays?

What is a creative writing essay, how to start a creative writing essay, what are some creative writing tips.

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Creative writing essays: tips, examples, and strategies, carla johnson.

• June 14, 2023
• Essay Topics and Ideas , How to Guides

Creative writing essays are a unique type of academic writing that lets you show your creativity and imagination while still following the rules of academic writing. Creative writing essays are not like other types of essays that rely heavily on research and facts. Instead, they depend on your ability to tell a story, create vivid images, and make your readers feel something.

Writing creatively is important for anyone who wants to express themselves in a unique and interesting way, not just fiction and poetry writers. Whether you are writing a personal essay , a descriptive essay, or an argumentative essay, adding creative elements can help make your writing more interesting and memorable.

In this article, we’ll talk about what to do and what not to do when writing a creative essay . We’ll look at tips, examples, and ways to write well. By following these rules, you can learn how to write creatively while still meeting the requirements of academic writing.

What You'll Learn

Understanding Creative Writing Essays

To write a good creative writing essay, you need to know how this unique type of academic writing works.

A creative writing essay is a type of academic essay that uses elements of creative writing, like telling a story, building characters, and using literary devices. The goal of a creative writing essay is to get the reader’s attention and hold it while still getting the message or argument across.

There are different kinds of creative writing essays, such as personal essays, essays that describe something, and essays that tell a story . Each of these types of essays needs a different way of writing them, but they all need to include creative elements.

Dos of Creative Writing Essays

Here are some dos of creative writing essays to keep in mind when writing:

1. Choosing a strong and interesting topic: Choose a topic that is interesting to you and that will engage your readers. This will help to keep your writing focused and engaging.

2. Developing a clear and engaging thesis statement: Your thesis statement should clearly convey the message or argument you are making in your essay . It should be engaging and capture the reader’s attention.

3. Creating well-rounded and dynamic characters: Characters are an important part of any creative writing essay. Develop characters that are well-rounded and dynamic, with their own unique personalities, motivations, and flaws.

4. Using sensory details to enhance the story: Sensory details, such as sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures, can help to bring yourwriting to life and create a more immersive experience for your readers. Use vivid and descriptive language to evoke the senses and create a more vivid world for your readers to imagine.

5. Incorporating dialogue effectively: Dialogue can be a powerful tool for conveying information and developing characters. Use dialogue to reveal character traits, advance the plot, and create tension.

6. Utilizing literary devices to enhance the story: Literary devices like metaphors, similes, symbols, and images can make a story more interesting and help the reader understand it better. Use these tools sparingly and on purpose to make your effect stronger.

By using these dos in your creative writing essay, you can make it more interesting, easy to remember, and effective.

To write a good creative writing essay, you need to use your imagination, skills, and knowledge. By learning the basics of this unique type of writing and following the dos in this article, you can make a more interesting and effective creative writing essay. Remember to pick a strong and interesting topic, make characters that are well-rounded, use details and dialogue well, and use literary devices to make the story better.

Don’ts of Creative Writing Essays

To avoid common pitfalls when writing a creative writing essay, here are some don’ts to keep in mind:

1. Overusing adjectives and adverbs: While descriptive language is important in creative writing, overusing adjectives and adverbs can make your writing feel cluttered and overwhelming.

2. Using cliches and predictable plot lines: Creative writing is all about bringing something new and fresh to the table. Using cliches and predictable plot lines can make your writing feel unoriginal and uninspired.

3. Writing flat and uninteresting characters: Characters are an important part of any creative writing essay. Flat and uninteresting characters can make your writing feel dull and unengaging.

4. Forgetting to revise and edit: Like any form of academic writing, it is important to revise and edit your creative writing essay to ensure that it is polished and error-free.

5. Using weak verbs and passive voice: Weak verbs and passive voice can make your writing feel flat and uninteresting. Use strong and active verbs to create a more dynamic and engaging narrative.

Inspiring Creative Writing Essay Examples

To gain a better understanding of what makes a successful creative writing essay, here are some inspiring examples to analyze:

1. The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

2. “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe

3. “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson

4. “A Good Man is Hard to Find”by Flannery O’Connor

5. “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe

6. “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” by James Thurber

7. “The Garden Party” by Katherine Mansfield

8. The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost

9. The Love Song of J . Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot

10. “To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell

By looking at these examples, you can see that symbolism, foreshadowing, and irony are often used in creative writing essays that work well. They also have well-thought-out characters, interesting plots, and language that evokes the senses and helps the reader picture a vivid world.

Each of these examples shows a different side of what it means to be human and helps us learn more about the world around us. These essays show how creative writing can captivate and interest readers, whether it’s about love, death, or what it’s like to be human.

Some of the most important things to learn from these examples are how important it is to have strong characters, use descriptive language well, and use literary devices to make the story better. By looking at these good examples of creative writing essays, writers can learn how to use the same techniques in their own work to make essays that are more interesting and effective.

How to Start a Creative Writing Essay with a Bang

Starting a creative writing essay in a way that captivates your reader is crucial for the success of your essay. Here are some different strategies you can use to start your essay with a bang:

1. Using attention-grabbing hooks to draw in the reader: Start with a provocative statement, a surprising fact, or a rhetorical question to pique the reader’s interest.

2. Crafting a strong opening sentence or paragraph: Create a vivid image or use descriptive language to set the scene and draw the reader into the story.

3. Starting in the middle of the action: Begin your story in the middle of a dramatic or exciting scene to immediately engage your reader.

4. Using an anecdote: Start with a personal anecdote that relates to the theme or message of your essay to draw the reader into your story.

By using attention-grabbing hooks and crafting a strong opening sentence or paragraph, you can hook your reader from the beginning and keep them engaged throughout your essay.

Elements of a Successful Creative Writing Essay

To write a successful creative writing essay, it is important to incorporate certain elements into your writing. Here are some elements to keep in mind:

1. Developing a strong plot and narrative structure: Your essay should have a clear beginning, middle, and end, with a well-developed plot that keeps the reader engaged.

2. Creating compelling and relatable characters: Your characters should be well-rounded, withunique personalities, motivations, and flaws that make them relatable and interesting to the reader.

3. Using descriptive language and sensory details: Use vivid and sensory language to create a world that the reader can imagine and visualize. This can enhance the reading experience and make your writing feel more immersive.

4. Incorporating dialogue and literary devices effectively: Dialogue can be a powerful tool for conveying information and developing characters. Literary devices like metaphor, simile, and symbolism can also be used to enhance the story and create deeper meaning.

5. Crafting a satisfying ending : Your essay should have a satisfying and conclusive ending that ties up loose ends and leaves a lasting impression on the reader.

To write a good creative writing essay, you need to use your imagination, skills, and knowledge. Use hooks and a strong first sentence or paragraph to get people interested in your essay right away. To make sure your story is successful, include things like a strong plot and story structure, interesting characters, descriptive language and sensory details, good dialogue and literary devices, and a satisfying ending. With these tips and elements in mind, you can write a powerful and memorable creative writing essay that engages and inspires your readers.

Creative Writing Essay Format

When it comes to formatting a creative writing essay, there are a few guidelines to keep in mind:

1. Use a standard font, such as Times New Roman or Arial, in 12-point size.

2. Double-space the text and use 1-inch margins on all sides.

3. Include a header with your name, the title of your essay , and the page number.

4. Use paragraph breaks to separate different ideas or sections of your essay .

5. Use italics or quotation marks to indicate dialogue or emphasize certain words or phrases.

Proper formatting is important to ensure that your work looks professional and is easy to read. By following these guidelines, you can create a polished and well-formatted creative writing essay.

When organizing and structuring your essay , consider using a clear and logical structure. This can include an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion. You may also want to use headings and subheadings to break up your writing into sections and make it easier to follow.

Creative Writing Essay Topics

Generating creative writing essay topics can be a fun and creative process. Here are some brainstorming techniques and examples to help you come up with ideas:

Brainstorming Techniques:

1. Freewriting: Set a timer for 10-15 minutes and write down whatever comes to mind. Don’t worry about grammar or spelling, just write freely.

2. Mind Mapping: Start with a central idea and branch out with related ideas. This can help you visualize connections between ideas and spark new ones.

3. Listing: Make a list of words or phrases that relate to a central theme or idea. This can help you see patterns and connections between ideas.

Examples of Creative Writing Essay Topics:

1. A childhood memory that shaped who you are today.

2. A personal essay about overcoming a challenge.

3. A fictional story set in a dystopian society.

4. A character study of a family member or friend .

5. A descriptive essay about a memorable place .

6. An exploration of a unique hobby or interest.

7. A persuasive essay about a social or political issue .

8. A narrative essay about a journey or adventure .

9. A creative nonfiction essay about a historical event or person.

10. A personal essay about your relationship with nature .

11. A fictional story about a time traveler.

12. An essay about a defining moment in your life .

13. A character study of a famous historical figure .

14. A descriptive essay about a favoritefood or dish.

15. A personal essay about your experience with mental health .

16. A fictional story about a haunted house.

17. A persuasive essay about the importance of education .

18. A narrative essay about a difficult decision you had to make.

19. A creative nonfiction essay about a place that has special meaning to you.

20. A personal essay about your experience with a different culture.

21. A fictional story about a person with a superpower.

22. A character study of a famous author or artist.

23. A descriptive essay about your favorite season.

24. A persuasive essay about the benefits of exercise.

25. A narrative essay about a trip that changed your perspective.

26. A creative nonfiction essay about your first job .

27. A personal essay about your experience with discrimination .

28. A fictional story about a post-apocalyptic world.

29. A character study of a famous musician or athlete.

30. A descriptive essay about a favorite childhood memory.

It is important to choose a topic that is both interesting and manageable. Consider your interests and passions, as well as the audience you are writing for. Remember that a well-chosen topic can make your writing more engaging and effective, while also making the writing process more enjoyable and fulfilling.

Tips for Making Your Creative Writing Essay Interesting

– Using descriptive language and sensory details

– Incorporating conflict and tension into the story

– Developing complex and dynamic characters

– Using humor, irony, or suspense to engage the reader

To make your creative writing essay interesting and engaging, consider the following tips:

1. Use descriptive language and sensory details: Creating a vivid world for the reader to imagine can enhance the reading experience and make your writing more immersive.

2. Incorporate conflict and tension into the story: Conflict drives the narrative forward and creates tension that keeps the reader engaged.

3. Develop complex and dynamic characters: Characters with unique personalities, motivations, and flaws can make your story more relatable and interesting.

4. Use humor, irony, or suspense to engage the reader: Adding a touch of humor, irony, or suspense can make your writing more engaging and keep the reader hooked.

By using these techniques, you can make your creative writing essay more interesting and memorable for your readers.

Revision and Editing Tips for Creative Writing Essays

Revision and editing are important steps in the writing process. Here are some tips for revising and editing your creative writing essay:

1. Take a break: Step away from your writing for a few hours or days to gain a fresh perspective on your work .

2. Read your work out loud: This can help you catch errors and awkward phrasing that may not be immediately apparent when reading silently.

3. Get feedback from others: Share your work with others and ask for constructive criticism and feedback.

4. Look for common mistakes: Pay attention to common mistakes such as grammar and spelling errors, repetition, and inconsistencies.

5.Focus on clarity and conciseness: Ensure that your writing is clear and concise, and that your ideas are presented in a logical and organized manner.

6. Make sure your characters are consistent: Ensure that your characters’ actions, motivations, and personalities are consistent throughout the story.

7. Cut unnecessary words and phrases: Eliminate unnecessary words and phrases to tighten your writing and make it more impactful.

8. Check for pacing: Ensure that your story is paced well and that it moves at a pace that keeps the reader engaged.

9. Pay attention to the ending: Ensure that your ending is satisfying and that it ties up loose ends in a way that leaves a lasting impression on the reader.

By revising and editing your creative writing essay, you can improve the overall quality of your work and ensure that it is polished and error-free.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. what is a creative writing essay.

A creative writing essay is a type of essay that allows writers to express their creativity and imagination. It can take many forms, including personal essays , short stories, poetry, and more.

2. What are the elements of a creative writing essay?

The elements of a creative writing essay include a strong plot and narrative structure, compelling and relatable characters, descriptive language and sensory details, effective use of dialogue and literary devices, and a satisfying ending.

3. How do I make my creative writing essay interesting?

You can make your creative writing essay interesting by using descriptive language and sensory details, incorporating conflict and tension into the story, developing complex and dynamic characters, and using humor, irony, or suspense to engage the reader.

4. What is the best way to start a creative writing essay?

You can start a creative writing essay with a provocative statement, a surprising fact, or a rhetorical question to pique the reader’s interest. Alternatively, you can create a vivid image or use descriptive language to set the scene and draw the reader into the story.

5. How can I revise and edit my creative writing essay effectively?

To revise and edit your creative writing essay effectively, take a break, read your work out loud, get feedback from others, look for common mistakes, focus on clarity and conciseness, ensure consistency in character development, cut unnecessary words and phrases, check for pacing, and pay attention to the ending.

In conclusion, a creative writing essay is a powerful way to express your creativity and imagination. By incorporating the elements of a strong plot and narrative structure, compelling characters, descriptive language and sensory details, effective use of dialogue and literary devices, and a satisfying ending, you can create a memorable and impactful piece of writing. To make your essay interesting , consider using descriptive language, incorporating conflict and tension, developing complex characters, and using humor, irony, or suspense. When revising and editing your essay, take a break, read your work out loud, get feedback, and pay attention to common mistakes.

We encourage you to start your own creative writing essay and explore the many possibilities that this type of writing offers. Remember to choose a topic that is both interesting and manageable, and to let your creativity and imagination shine through in your writing. With these tips and techniques in mind, you can create a powerful and memorable creative writing essay that engages and inspires your readers.

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Understanding Creativity

• Posted June 25, 2020
• By Emily Boudreau

Understanding the learning that happens with creative work can often be elusive in any K–12 subject. A new study from Harvard Graduate School of Education Associate Professor Karen Brennan , and researchers Paulina Haduong and Emily Veno, compiles case studies, interviews, and assessment artifacts from 80 computer science teachers across the K–12 space. These data shed new light on how teachers tackle this challenge in an emerging subject area.

“A common refrain we were hearing from teachers was, ‘We’re really excited about doing creative work in the classroom but we’re uncertain about how to assess what kids are learning, and that makes it hard for us to do what we want to do,’” Brennan says. “We wanted to learn from teachers who are supporting and assessing creativity in the classroom, and amplify their work, and celebrate it and show what’s possible as a way of helping other teachers.”

Create a culture that values meaningful assessment for learning — not just grades

As many schools and districts decided to suspend letter grades during the pandemic, teachers need to help students find intrinsic motivation. “It’s a great moment to ask, ‘What would assessment look like without a focus on grades and competition?’” says Veno.

Indeed, the practice of fostering a classroom culture that celebrates student voice, creativity, and exploration isn’t limited to computer science. The practice of being a creative agent in the world extends through all subject areas.

The research team suggests the following principles from computer science classrooms may help shape assessment culture across grade levels and subject areas.

Solicit different kinds of feedback

Give students the time and space to receive and incorporate feedback. “One thing that’s been highlighted in assessment work is that it is not about the teacher talking to a student in a vacuum,” says Haduong, noting that hearing from peers and outside audience members can help students find meaning and direction as they move forward with their projects.

• Feedback rubrics help students receive targeted feedback from audience members. Additionally, looking at the rubrics can help the teacher gather data on student work.

Emphasize the process for teachers and students

Finding the appropriate rubric or creating effective project scaffolding is a journey. Indeed, according to Haduong, “we found that many educators had a deep commitment to iteration in their own work.” Successful assessment practices conveyed that spirit to students.

• Keeping design journals can help students see their work as it progresses and provides documentation for teachers on the student’s process.
• Consider the message sent by the form and aesthetics of rubrics. One educator decided to use a handwritten assessment to convey that teachers, too, are working on refining their practice.

Scaffold independence

Students need to be able to take ownership of their learning as virtual learning lessens teacher oversight. Students need to look at their own work critically and know when they’ve done their best. Teachers need to guide students in this process and provide scaffolded opportunities for reflection.

• Have students design their own assessment rubric. Students then develop their own continuum to help independently set expectations for themselves and their work.

Key Takeaways

• Assessment shouldn’t be limited to the grade a student receives at the end of the semester or a final exam. Rather, it should be part of the classroom culture and it should be continuous, with an emphasis on using assessment not for accountability or extrinsic motivation, but to support student learning.
• Teachers can help learners see that learning and teaching are iterative processes by being more transparent about their own efforts to reflect and iterate on their practices.
• Teachers should scaffold opportunities for students to evaluate their own work and develop independence.

Additional Resources

• Creative Computing curriculum and projects
• Karen Brennan on helping kids get “unstuck”
• Usable Knowledge on how assessment can help continue the learning process

Usable Knowledge

Connecting education research to practice — with timely insights for educators, families, and communities

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British Council

• English, education and arts
• Creative play in the digital age

Defining creativity: Literature review, part 1 of 3

What is creativity? What theoretical frameworks exist to help us understand and assess it?

This first chapter in a literature review looking at the role of creative play in developing creativity in the digital age considers what creativity can mean in the 21st century. 

In the first chapter of the literature review we explore the nature and meaning of creativity and attempts to contextualise it in the 21st century. Creativity is often associated with artistic activity or - at its most extreme - with unique moments of genius changing how we understand and live our lives.  However, creativity as a skill can be expressed and leveraged by a variety of actors in a broad range of contexts. This concept of ‘everyday creativity’ was defined, assessed, and validated in the 1980s as expressions of originality and meaningfulness (Richards, 2019). 

Here, we will analyse creativity through the lens of one particular model, established by Mel Rhodes, called the 4 Ps of Creativity (Rhodes, 1961). The model has been regularly referenced since it was first published, with researchers continuing to draw on this framework today, and can also be applied to work that predates its publication. It positions creativity as an almost abstract outcome resulting from one or several of four constituent parts:

• Place , called Press in the original model, in reference to the environmental factors that ‘press’ on the individual. This references physical and social aspects of the environment that influence the capacity to be creative. This could be the layout of a room (Piscitelli & Penfold, 2015) or cultures within an organisation that affect personal autonomy, openness and access to resources and information sharing practices (Munro, 2017).
• Person includes individual traits including genetic dispositions (Runco, et al., 2011), types of intelligence (Gardner, 1993), emotional openness (Ivcevic & Hoffman, 2019) and knowledge or skill level (Amabile, 1996)
• Process relates to behavioural factors such as modes of divergent and convergent thinking (Guilford, 1957), and collaborative engagement (Sawyer K. , 2018).
• Product references the outcome of the creative process and involves notions of assessment (Hennessey, Amabile, & Mueller, 2018)

Table 1 - Rhodes' 4Ps of Creativity

Although these categories often overlap, they offer a useful way to think about how we can understand creativity.

In addition to the 4 Ps model we will use other models to illuminate the nature of creativity. We will consider how creativity is assessed, and how the nature and expression of creativity is challenged and changed by recent digital and technological innovations.  Alongside this, we will introduce other models and frameworks to explore the nature of creativity. 

A definition of creative products 

If creativity occurs across all disciplines and sectors, how can we define a creative output?

The easiest aspects of creativity to visualise are the products and solutions it generates. A creative solution can be a completely new invention, or the reuse of an existing practice  (Guilford, 1950). What matters is that the contribution is both novel and appropriate (Boden, 2004). Novelty emphasises the originality of construction in any given context. Appropriateness emphasises that the construction is considered fit for purpose and valued by a relevant community (Amabile, 2018). However, there are some concerns about using appropriateness to identify creative products.

Culture and communities have different notions of appropriateness (Amabile, 2018). This can lead to domain-specific criteria for evaluating potentially creative contributions (Baer, 2018). In artistic disciplines, a creative performance may require a dynamic expression of an idea that is so individual it cannot be replicated (Amabile, 2018). In contrast, creative developments in physical science will have replicability as a core criterion of appropriateness (Amabile, 2018). A creative development in social science may reveal new relationships between the environment and group behaviour, whereas in business, creativity may involve using these social science perspectives in new ways to create economic growth. 

Furthermore, appropriateness is culturally dependent, with Western societies placing higher value on horizontal creativity, and Asian societies placing greater value on vertical creativity (Gardner & Weinstein, 2018; Niu, 2019).  Horizontal creativity privileges individual interpretations and the novelty and divergence of creative expression and thinking.  In contrast, vertical creativity privileges innovation within an existing practice and the contextual relevance of new ideas (Niu 2019). Ultimately, although there is an essential commonality in definition, interpretations and evaluations of creativity are dependent on cultural, social and disciplinary contexts (Amabile, 2018).

Using systems models to help us understand creativity

What are systems models, and how can they help us understand creativity? 

Systems models illuminate the relationship between an individual or group with specific traits and expertise, the cultural resources these individuals draw on, and the group of individuals who consider the contributors and act as gatekeepers (Csikszentmihalyi, 1999) (Gardner & Weinstein, 2018). 

Systems models of creativity are useful when we try to understand creative productivity within a specific domain of activity.  Systems models highlight the interdependent relationship between individual insights and domain-relevant knowledge  (Csikszentmihalyi, 1999) (Gardner & Weinstein, 2018). This relationship can be understood as a conversation between an individual or group with specific traits and expertise, a domain of cultural resources and a field of knowledgeable individuals who evaluate the contributions and act as domain gatekeepers (Figure 1). Domain-relevant knowledge is a resource individuals can draw on to innovate. If members of the field judge the innovation novel and appropriate, it will be retained by the community, sometimes becoming an essential component of domain-relevant knowledge (Csikszentmihalyi, 1999). If the innovation has a large impact in the field, it has the potential to transform the domain, or create a new domain. These models are particularly useful in contexts where a product is created for a specific audience, such as research and development settings or start-up businesses.

The ‘Four Cs’ of creativity 

Within or outside of a systems model, creativity can clearly generate a broad range of products and solutions. These different types of products are best illustrated by the ‘4 Cs’ of creativity model, developed by Beghetto and Kaufman, which uses a four-tiered hierarchy to map a continuum of creative products from everyday learning and local problem solving, to field-defining artistry and invention (Beghetto & Kaufman, 2016). 

Mini-c creativity refers to the everyday little ‘Eureka’ moments of developmental learning. In this model, ‘Mini-c’ insights are based on Vygotsky’s (1976) conception of learning as a dynamic process of knowledge construction.  Hence, personal insights are creative acts in the mind of the learner as they construct, i.e. the “novel and personally meaningful interpretation of experiences” (Beghetto & Kaufman, 2016). If ‘Mini-c’ insights are explored and developed, they can lead to Little-c creativity. ‘Little-c’ creativity describes innovations in everyday life that solve localised problems and are considered new and valuable by a local community.

As ‘Mini-c’ and ‘Little-c’ are personally and locally meaningful creative acts, by contrast, Pro-c and Big-C creativity focus on the domain-specific knowledge generation and wider social impact of creative action (Beghetto & Kaufman, 2016). ‘Pro-c’ creativity are solutions that require professional-level knowledge and are valued by a community of experts. Although ‘Pro-c’ insights have an impact within a professional community, they do not dramatically transform the field of professional expertise. In contrast, ‘Big-C’ creativity is the work of pioneers and eminent thinkers, like Picasso or Einstein, who transform an existing field of study, or develop a completely new one. ‘Big-C’ creativity normally reflects a body of work, often over a lifetime (Gardner, 1993).

Table 2 - Beghetto & Kaufman's 4 Cs of Creativity

‘Mini-c’ and ‘Little-c’ are especially useful ways of thinking about creativity in educational and community contexts where the emphasis is often on developing personal expression, personal growth and localised solutions. ‘Pro-c’ and ‘Big-C’ are more suitable ways of thinking about creative impact in professional domains, such as the performing arts, business and research. Reflecting the previously mentioned overlap between the ‘Four Ps’, analysis of ‘Big-C’ creative products are likely to focus more on the unique aspects of the creator (Gardner & Weinstein, 2018), whereas analysis of everyday creative products may well focus on the creative process and more conventional aspects of the social and learning environment from which the creativity arose (Simonton, 2019). 

Creative processes

In order to facilitate creative production, it is necessary to consider the nature of the creative process. The creative process can be considered as a set of iterative behaviours that enable people to explore conceptual space, identify new opportunities and problems, and generate novel and appropriate solutions (Boden, 2004). 

In the creative process, imaginative and critical skills are complementary and follow patterns of divergent and convergent thinking (Guilford, 1957). Divergent thinking is the use of imagination and experimentation to open up conceptual space and generate new pathways and perspectives. Whereas convergent thinking is the application of contextualised observations, logical thought and systemised approaches to choose a suitable solution and make it fit for purpose. The iteration of divergent and convergent thinking in relation to a problem allows innovative and valued solutions to be generated. Furthermore, the goal-oriented and open-ended nature of creative processes combined with a strong sense of competence and control can facilitate ‘flow’ (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990)  (Sawyer K. , 2012) and other positive psychological states (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). Hence, the creative process is not only desirable for the products and social competence it generates but also for its positive impact on psychological well-being.

Creative collaboration

One type of creative process that merits further examination is the nature of creative collaboration. In the analysis of Creative Products, the value of partnership was already suggested: systems models are essentially collaborative, as people work with the ideas of others, using tools and materials created by others, and address a specific audience. However, there is also a clear body of literature that specifically examines the value of collaboration for the creative process.

Research that compares postgraduate studies on creativity from the Wehner et al. 1991 study (Wehner, Csikszentmihalyi, & I.Magyari-Beck, 1991) with data from 2005-2007 studies reveals an increasing focus on product and group creativity (C.H. Kahl, 2009). These findings are consistent with the view that modern creativity research has moved from a focus on the personality traits of Big-C thinkers to creativity emerging from more everyday interactions (Gardner & Weinstein, 2018).

Collaboration in small groups is a well-known method used in organisations to create highly progressive innovation (Bennis & Biederman, 1998). Creative teams can disperse the cognitive load required to think creatively about complex problems and build on each other’s ideas to create something greater than they could achieve on their own (Sawyer K. , 2007). Creative collaboration takes the social and dialogic nature of creative action to a higher level. 

A key component of effective creative collaboration is the ability to be reflexive and take up the perspectives of others  (Kaufman & Glaveneau, 2019). Remaining open to new ideas and perspectives throughout the creative process is important to facilitate collaboration. Social-emotional imagination facilitates group creativity by expanding imaginative potential. Reflexive modes of thinking create conceptual space and mental flexibility that allows ideas to flow (Gotlieb, Hyde, Immordino-Yang, & Kaufman, 2019). For example, flexible identity construction is the ability to maintain a clear sense of self whilst moving between different aspects of identity. This flexibility enables people to find a shared aspect of identity and connect with a diverse range of people.  Constructive internal reflection is a form of imaginative sense-making in which an individual can think reflexively about their own values and sense of purpose, then apply this understanding to imagine the perspectives of others (Immordino-Yang, Christodoulou, & Singh, 2012).

These reflexive modes of thinking are supported by polycultural thinking, informed by different cultural frames of references. Polycultural thinking can improve problem solving, complex thinking and democratic outcomes of group engagement (Hurtado, 2005). The combination of these reflexive and cultural modes of thinking enables us to suspend judgement, imagine a broader spectrum of possibilities and collaborate flexibly in democratic and socio-culturally sensitive ways (Gotlieb, Hyde, Immordino-Yang, & Kaufman, 2019). 

When creativity is viewed as an emergent property of group interaction, it begins to share some similarities with the concept of improvisation and group play. The three key aspects of effective collaboration are an egalitarian ethos, a lack of specificity, and moment-to-moment contingency (Sawyer K. , 2018). An egalitarian ethos means all members can participate freely, which maximises the pool of ideas and inspiration. A lack of specificity is a strategic ambiguity that leaves space open to interpretation. Moment-to-moment contingency is utilising the lack of specificity to create divergent spaces. The combination of these elements enables the layering of ideas and the growth of complexity from which sense and innovative thinking emerge (Sawyer K. , 2018). Complex systems behaviour emerges from unpredictability and inter-subjectivity and cannot be explained by reference to reductive psychology that concentrates analysis solely at the level of the individual (Sawyer K. , 2018). This highlights the social and interpersonal nature of creativity, and points to the importance of interaction, flexibility of identity and creative play in the development of creative potential.

The role of place and person

As per Rhodes’ (1961) model, place and person sit alongside product and process. Place and person address how aspects of the environment and personality influence creativity. Creative environments are social spaces (analogue and digital) that enable the creative process and lead to the generation of novel and contextually valuable forms of learning, expression, or production.  How individuals engage with their environment during the creative process is not incidental to the nature of the products they create (Rhodes, 1961).

One key ‘place’ that could be considered here are education environments. Educational learning environments cover a wide variety of life course contexts from preschool to PhD research, and a wide variety of domains from sandpit play to astrophysics. The focus of creative behaviour within learning also changes a great deal (Hui, He, & Wong, 2019) shifting from original and personal insights in preschool as children make sense of the world around them, to higher quality insights during compulsory and undergraduate education, through to generating novel and useful insights that hold societal significance in post-graduate and PhD research work where theoretical creativity is required (Lovitts, 2005). 

Assessing the four Ps

There are a number of specific tools that have been used to measure creative output. Increases in creative productivity can be measured by assessing the quality and quantity of products or ideas generated. Tools that measure the creative process assess occurrences of divergent thinking, originality, flexibility and elaboration within individuals and groups. Personality traits and past behaviours have been measured to identify the creative characteristics of a person or group, often through self-assessment. Measuring creative environments is a less focused area of research, reflected in the limited number of specific tools identified.

One of the most widespread models used for measuring creative products is the Creative Assessment Technique (CAT) created by Amabile (1982). This is a domain-specific method of evaluation in which experts in the field are required to use their expert and informed opinion to rate the creativity of a new product or proposal.  One of the key benefits of analyses that measure the product is that they avoid the measurement problems of psychometric testing.  Furthermore, they are domain-specific and so combine both the novel aspect of creativity and the notion of appropriateness. CAT has been shown to be reliable across a wide range of applications and contexts (Plucker, Makel, & Qian, 2019), however there is still the question of who constitutes a suitable expert.  Research suggests that the level of expertise required for suitable evaluation and the inter-rater reliability will differ with the domain-specificity of the product in question.

To assess creative development, creative responses during the creative process, or the creativity of the final product generated, can be measured.  There are a variety of tools that aim to measure the creative process in terms of divergent thinking, i.e. the novelty and number of ideas generated. Divergent thinking as a domain general skill is measured by tests such as the Torrance’s (1974) Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT) and Guilford’s (1967) Structure of the Intellect (SOI) test. These tests rely on using visual and verbal prompts and measure the fluency of ideas, i.e. the number of divergent responses individuals make. Guilford’s test uses sub-categories such as originality, how unique an idea is; flexibility, how many different categories of response an individual makes; and elaboration, the depth and detail of the explanation provided (Plucker, Makel, & Qian, 2019). The TTCT uses verbal and figural prompts and similar methods of scoring to the SOI. Test question categories include Product Improvement, Guessing Causes and Just Suppose. For example, “Suppose you were invisible for a day.  What problems would that cause and what benefits would it generate?”  Such tests are often used in pre- and post-test evaluation in research interventions designed to improve creative responses (Berrueco & Garaigordobil, 2011).  Although there is a general acceptance of the reliability of scoring and results, this is dependent on the level of training of the scorers (Plucker, Makel, & Qian, 2019). Furthermore, as these tests only measure the novelty of an idea, it is questionable whether they are suitable for modern domain specific conceptions of creativity (Baer, 2011) (Kim, 2011).

Personality scales measure aspects of personality or past behaviour and are often used to compare groups. These tests are generally based on self-assessment, though some models involve external assessment. Examples of the tests include the Creative Personality Scale (Kaufman & Baer, 2004), the Creativity Achievement Questionnaire (Carson, Peterson, & Higgins, 2005) and the Big Five Personality Traits (Karwowski & Lebuda, 2016). These tests show certain characteristics as common among creative people such as being open to experience, autonomous, introverted dominant and impulsive (Plucker, Makel, & Qian, 2019). Although these tests do not measure creative development, they can be used to assess creative tendencies in individuals across different times.  However, not all qualities that make a creative person are necessarily conducive to group creativity.  For example, being open-minded, curious and having a sense of humour would be conducive to group creativity (Davis, 1992). However, being driven, hostile, dominant and impulsive may be problematic when trying to negotiate conflict or generating psychologically safe environments in which people feel they can take risks (Feist G. , 1998) (Reiter-Palmon, Mitchell, & Royston, 2019). If collaborative creativity is to be measured, it will require a non-reductive method of analysis that takes into account socio-cultural and emergent aspects of the creative process. 

Although there are many models for assessing how working environments affect productivity, there are very few that focus solely on creativity (Plucker, Makel, & Qian, 2019). However, Amabile and colleagues (Amabile, 1996) developed the KEYS: Assessing the Climate for Creativity self-assessment instrument to review the relationship between working environment and creativity in teams. The tool assesses aspects of the environment that stimulate and inhibit creative responses. The KEYS scale involves detailed self-analysis and measures management practices, motivation and interaction among team members. Results have shown the scales can discriminate between team working environments that will generate high and low creativity rates.

Concluding how to define creativity in the digital age: part 1

The digital age, however, appears to challenge much of this existing work on the nature of creativity: it is clear that online creativity and audiences are affecting the meaning, expression and impact of creativity (Literat & Glaveneau, 2018), and distinct new ‘creator’ groups are emerging, such as of produsers (Bruns, 2008), people who simultaneously produce and consume a product.  

New digital media (NDM) and Web 2.0 technologies have changed how communication takes place and provided new opportunities for artistic expression, co-creation and the dissemination of creative works online (Gardner & Weinstein, 2018) and the networked and participatory nature of online engagement brings into question the separation between creative act, performance, and communication with an audience (Literat & Glaveneau, 2018). For example, affinity groups enable ‘Mini-c’ creativity by allowing individuals with similar interests to mentor and support each other in the development of their creative skills. Sites such as Behance and Dribbble allow professional artists and designers to share their work, receive constructive feedback and inspiration (Hemsley & Tanupabrungsun, 2018). As comments are a common aspect of social networking services’ (SNS) interactions, the notion of evaluation and field are inherent aspects of SNS based creativity. On SNS sites such as Instagram, professionals, produsers and amateurs post creative performances, and outcomes are likely to range from ‘mini-c’ inspiration to ‘Pro-c’ influence. However, the notion of field and the relationship between producer and audience is difficult to define (Literat & Glaveneau, 2018). Therefore, in online contexts, where the nature of the audience is networked and highly distributed, there is likely to be a more fluid notion of field and a less well defined and regulated notion of domain (Literat & Glaveneau, 2018). This networked notion of creativity also brings out the dialogic and collaborative nature of online creativity and its close association with personal identity online (Literat & Glaveneau, 2018). 

However, sharing creativity and posting is not always regarded in a positive light. It has been argued NDM’s role in the attention economy has created higher levels of distraction (Turkle, 2015). For example, SNS users often create posts for short-term amusement, to cause alarm or elicit controversy. SNS memes become viral and are shared across huge networks. These memes and jokes are expressive, but they are forgotten as quickly as they are generated (Gardner & Weinstein, 2018). The remixing and rapid dissemination of these personal works in NDM have problematised traditional notions of appropriateness and authorship (Gardner & Weinstein, 2018).

More seriously, technology designers, executives and researchers have recently expressed concern about the implications of attention economy based business models for the design of digital tools. The goal of maximising users’ time online can result in intentional hijacking of the mind, via monetisation of thoughts, emotions, and actions, with potentially serious consequences for mental health, relationships and democracy (Lewis, 2017) (Center for Humane Technology, 2019). The suggestion that digital tools can and do exploit human vulnerability and reduce autonomy via addiction by design has significant implications for creativity. Hence, the digital realm offers new arenas for group engagement from which creativity can emerge, but also new dilemmas about the value and purpose of creative work and how to distribute it respectfully.  

In part 2 of the literature review, we will explore creative play in greater depth, and in part three analyse the relationship between creativity and creative play in the digital age. 

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Lewis, P. (2017, October 5th). Our minds can be hijacked: the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia. Retrieved from The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/05/smartphone-addiction-...

Literat, I., & Glaveneau, V. (2018). Distributed Creativity on the Internet: A Theoretical FOundation for OnlineCreative Participation. International Journal of Communication 12, 893-908.

Lovitts, B. (2005). Being a good course taker is not enough: A theoretical perspective on the transition to independent research. Studies in Higher Education.

Munro, R. (2017). Creativity, Organisation and Entrepreneurship: Power and Play. Organization Studies - Special Issue: Organizational Creativity, Play and Entrepreneurship, 209-227.

Piscitelli, B., & Penfold, L. (2015). Child-centred Practice in Museums: Experiential Learning through Creative Play at the Ipswich Art Gallery. Curator The Museum Journal, 58 (3).

Plucker, J., Makel, M., & Qian, M. (2019). Assessment of Creativity. In J. Kaufman, & R. Sternberg, The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Reiter-Palmon, R., Mitchell, K., & Royston, R. (2019). Improving Creativity in Organisational Settings: Applying Research on Creativity to Organizations. In J. Kaufman, & R. Sternberg, The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Rhodes, M. (1961). An Analysis of Creativity. The Phi Delta Kappan, 42, 305-310.

Richards, R. (2019). Everyday Creativity: Process and Way of Life -- Four Key Issues. In J. Kaufman, & R. Sternberg, The Cambridge handbook of Creativity (pp. 189-215). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Runco, M., Noble, E., Reiter-Palmon, R., Acar, S., Ritchie, T., & Yurkovich, J. (2011). The genetic basis of creativity and ideational fluency. Creativity Research Journal 23 (4), 376-380.

Sawyer, K. (2007). Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration. New York: Oxford University Press.

Sawyer, K. (2012). Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation. New York: Oxford University Press.

Sawyer, K. (2018). An Interdisciplinary Study of Group Creativity. In R. Sternberg, & J. Kaufman, The Nature of Human Creativity. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Seligman, M., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2000). Positive Psychology: An Introduction. American Psychologist, 5-14.

Simonton, D. (2019). Creativity's Role in Society. In J. Kaufman, & R. Sternberg, The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity. New York: Cambridge University Press .

Torrance, E. (1974). The Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking- Norms-Technical Manual-Research Edition-Verbal Tests, Forms And B - Figural Tests, Forms A and B. Princeton: Personnel Press.

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Wehner, L., Csikszentmihalyi, M., & I.Magyari-Beck. (1991). Current approaches used in studying creativity: an exploratory investigation. Creativity Research Journal (4), 261-271.

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Creativity and the Brain: How to Be a Creative Thinker

What do we know from research on brain activity involved in creative thought.

Posted April 30, 2024 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk

• The book "The Creative Act" argues that creativity is a skill we can all use daily.
• Creativity is complex and involves multiple brain regions.
• Research shows that there are several ways to improve our creative thinking.

This post is part 2 of a series.

In my previous post, I wrote that, after being inspired by Rick Rubin’s book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being, I decided to find out what is going on in the human brain that results in creativity. It turned out to be a very complex and complicated subject. That is mainly because it is difficult to clearly define creativity, and there are many different kinds of creative processes, such as visual art, music, creative thinking , etc.

Coming from the field of cognitive processes, I decided that I would concentrate on research related to brain activity involved in creative thought processes. Most of the time, cognitive creativity involves testing the person’s divergent thinking (generating possible solutions to the problem) or convergent thinking (finding a single, correct solution to the problem).

The review of research papers indicated that creative thinking (convergent and divergent thinking) requires the coordination of multiple brain regions, mainly the executive control network (simply speaking involves planning, organizing, problem-solving, and decision-making ), default mode network (areas of the brain that are activated when we are letting our minds wander at rest), and salience network (a network that is involved in the awareness of the feelings associated with rewards). But, obviously, other parts of the brain are also involved, and this depends on the specific goal/outcome that we want to achieve.

I also promised my readers that I would try to find answers to the question of how to be a creative thinker. There are many suggestions on the internet, but let’s see what the research says.

You can learn how to meditate and practice it daily.

It may come as a surprise to many people, but the majority of the research papers in that area point to the daily practice of meditation as a way to improve creative thinking. It is not a surprise to me because I am a believer in meditation and do it daily. I also encourage all my patients to try to do it daily.

In a Chinese study (Ding, X. et al. 2014), 40 Chinese undergraduate students were assigned to three groups, a meditation group (30 minutes daily for 7 days), a relaxation training group, and a control group. Creativity performance was assessed by the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT). The results indicated that the subjects in the meditation group improved their creativity performance on the divergent thinking tasks.

Research studies on meditation also indicate that it helps improve attention/ concentration skills and emotional regulation and reduces stress and anxiety , so it looks like a good daily habit to start.

You can read aloud and do arithmetic calculations.

In a Taiwan study (Lin, WL. et al. 2018), 50 junior high students were divided into a training group or a control group. The training group was reading aloud and performing arithmetic calculations for 20 sessions. The control group played the game Tetris (a puzzle video game). The results indicated that the participants in the training group outperformed the control group in thinking and creative abilities.

You can do neurofeedback.

Neurofeedback is a computer-guided, noninvasive brain-function training based on electroencephalography (EEG) feedback. Neurofeedback is also called neurotherapy, neurobiofeedback, or EEG biofeedback, and it helps control involuntary processes such as muscle tension and heart rate. Usually, the person is responding to a computer display of her/his own electrical activity of the brain, but it may also simply be a sound stimulation. The most important factor is that neurofeedback focuses on helping a person train himself/herself to regulate brain functions.

In an Italian study (Agnoli, S. et al. 2018), 80 female students from the University of Bologna got three neurofeedback training sessions. The researchers also measured the participants’ lifetime creative achievement by using the Creative Activity and Accomplishment Checklist. The results were measured with the divergent thinking tasks (producing original and effective ideas). The results indicated an increase in both originality and fluency. The increase was particularly evident in participants with an initial low creative achievement level.

This is good news for people who believe that they are not that creative. You may get better with neurofeedback training sessions. Artists and athletes do this nowadays to enhance their performance.

You can do overinclusive thinking training.

Overinclusive thinking can be described as increased generalization and/or considering concepts that most people consider unrelated to certain categories, which provides an increased number of options. In a Taiwan study (Chiu, F.C. 2015), the researcher examined the effect of overinclusive thinking on creativity. Four experiments were designed, and the subjects were undergraduate students who were randomly assigned to an overinclusive thinking training group or a control group. The training group did better on the overinclusive thinking that is related to creativity. The fluency and originality performance were higher than in the control group and the insight problem-solving was also better than in the control group.

So, if you would like to be a creative thinker, you can try some of the ideas described above. Good luck on the road to creativity!

Rick Rubin. The Creative Act: A Way of Being . Penguin Press, NY 2023.

Ding, X. et al. “Improving creativity performance by short-term meditation” Behavioral and Brain Functions. Vol. 10, 2014.

Lin, WL. et al. “ Improving junior high students’ thinking and creative abilities with an executive function training program” Thinking Skills and Creativity . Vol. 29, Sept. 2018.

Agnoli, S. et al. “Enhancing creative cognition with a rapid right-parietal neurofeedback procedure.” Neuropsychologia, Vol. 118, Part A Sept. 2018.

Chiu, F.C. “ Improving your creative potential without awareness: Overinclusive thinking training.” Thinking Skills and Creativity . Vol 15. March 2015.

Barbara Koltuska-Haskin, Ph.D., is a neuropsychologist in Albuquerque, New Mexico and the author of How My Brain Works.

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Your chance of acceptance, your chancing factors, extracurriculars, uc creativity essay – what to write about.

For those who have already applied or are currently applying to the UC system, how did you approach the creativity essay? What topics did you explore? I'm struggling to come up with unique ideas, and any input would be appreciated!

The best way to tackle this essay is to think honestly about how your creativity has played a significant role in your life, your interests, or your personal growth. Here are a few general ideas to get you started:

1. A specific project or creation: If you've worked on an art piece, craft, or any hands-on project, you could discuss your creative process and the skills you've gained from it. Make sure to tie it back to how this project has contributed to your overall growth and/or made an impact on your community.

2. Finding creative solutions: You could write about a challenge or problem you've encountered, and how you used your creativity to address it. This could be in the context of studying, group projects, or your own ventures (e.g. starting a small business or organizing an event).

3. Personal expression: If you have a unique talent or passion (music, writing, visual arts, etc.), you could discuss how you've used that talent to explore your own emotions, thoughts, or ideas. Talk about why expressing yourself creatively is essential to who you are and how it's helped you grow.

4. Innovating within an activity: If you've participated in extracurriculars or clubs and found ways to introduce innovative and creative ideas, this could be a great topic. For example, maybe you revolutionized your school newspaper's layout or devised a new practice plan for your basketball team.

5. Creativity in everyday life: Creativity doesn't always have to be limited to traditional art forms. Think about your daily life and identify times you've found creative solutions or approaches. This could include anything from cooking, to planning travel itineraries, to decorating your room, to even managing your time.

If you're looking for even more structured guidance, check out CollegeVine's master post on the UC application ( https://blog.collegevine.com/how-to-write-the-university-of-california-essays) and examples of strong UC essays, including those responding to the creativity prompt ( https://blog.collegevine.com/university-of-california-essay-examples). Once you have a draft of your own, also remember that CollegeVine offers both free peer essay review and paid reviews by expert college admissions advisors—this objective perspective can give you a clearer sense of whether or not your response is working.

Remember to stay genuine and focused on your own experiences. When writing the essay, highlight not only what you did specifically, but also how your creativity affected your thinking, influenced those around you, and contributed to your personal growth. Good luck!

About CollegeVine’s Expert FAQ

CollegeVine’s Q&A seeks to offer informed perspectives on commonly asked admissions questions. Every answer is refined and validated by our team of admissions experts to ensure it resonates with trusted knowledge in the field.

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Few things shape the human experience as profoundly or as pervasively as creativity does. And creativity raises a wealth of philosophical issues. Since art is such a salient domain of creativity, you might assume, at first, that the philosophy of creativity is the philosophy of art or aesthetics, or a branch thereof. But creativity invites questions of its own that go beyond the purview of those other fields.

Note that the adjective “creative” can be applied to three kinds of things: a person (“Beyoncé is creative”), a process or activity (“Tell us about your creative process”), or a product , where the latter is taken broadly to include an idea in someone’s mind or an observable performance or artifact (“That’s a creative design”).

Now suppose you are looking at a creative product, like a painting or sculpture. The philosophy of art may ask, “What makes this a work of art?” and aesthetics may ask, “What makes this beautiful?”. By contrast, the philosophy of creativity asks, “What makes this creative? Is it just that it’s new, or must it meet further conditions?” We may ask the same question not just of artworks but of any creative product, whether it be a new scientific theory, a technological invention, a philosophical breakthrough, or a novel solution to a mathematical or logical puzzle. Beyond creative products, we can ask about the creative process : Must it proceed without following rules? Is it conscious, unconscious, or both? Must it be an expression of the creator’s agency, and, if so, must that agency be exercised intentionally? Exactly how does the process manage to produce new things? Can it be explained scientifically? Furthermore, we can ask about creative persons, or more generally, creators. What does it mean for a person to be creative? Is it a virtue to be creative? What capacities and characteristics does a being need to have in order to be creative? Could a computer be creative? These are the kinds of questions animating the literature we’ll survey below.

Some of these questions have an empirical dimension, most obviously those which pertain to how the creative process is actually carried out. Thus, much of the research we’ll canvass falls under the inter-disciplinary umbrella of cognitive science, with contributions not only from philosophers but also from researchers in neighboring fields like psychology, neuroscience, and computer science.

1. The Philosophy of Creativity: Past and Present

2.1 challenges to the value condition, 2.2.1 surprise, 2.2.2 originality, 2.2.3 spontaneity, 2.2.4 agency, 2.3 is creativity a virtue, 3. can creativity be learned, 4. can creativity be explained, 5.1 preparation, 5.2.1 blind variation, 5.2.2 the default-mode network, 5.2.3 imagination, 5.2.4 incubation, 5.3 insight, 5.4 evaluation, 5.5 externalization, 5.6 worries and future directions, 6. creativity and artificial intelligence, 7. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries.

Given the significance creativity has in our lives and the deep philosophical questions it raises, one might expect creativity to be a major topic in philosophy. Curiously, it isn’t.

To be sure, some of the most prominent figures in the history of Western philosophy have been fascinated with creativity—or what we now call “creativity”. According to some scholars, the abstract noun for creativity did not appear until the nineteenth century—but the phenomenon certainly existed and many philosophers took an interest in it (McMahon 2013; Nahm 1956; Murray 1989; Tatarkiewicz 1980: chapter 8).

To name just a few examples: Plato (4 th century BCE) had Socrates say, in certain dialogues, that when poets produce truly great poetry, they do it not through knowledge or mastery, but rather by being divinely “inspired” by the Muses, in a state of possession that exhibits a kind of madness ( Ion and Phaedrus ). Aristotle (3 rd century BCE), in contrast, characterized the work of the poet as a rational, goal-directed activity of making ( poeisis ), in which the poet employs various means (such as sympathetic characters and plots involving twists of fate) to achieve an end (of eliciting various emotions in the audience). Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673) and Émilie du Châtelet (1706–1749) championed the creative use of the imagination to pursue freedom, overcome prejudice, and cultivate natural abilities even despite social and political oppression . Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) conceived of artistic genius as an innate capacity to produce original works through the free play of the imagination, a process which does not consist in following rules, can neither be learned nor taught, and is mysterious even to geniuses themselves. Schopenhauer (1788–1860) stressed that the greatest artists are distinguished not only by the technical skill they employ in the production of art, but also by the capacity to “lose themselves” in the experience of what is beautiful and sublime (Schopenhauer 1859: Vol. I: 184–194 and Vol. II: 376–402). Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) argued that the greatest feats of creativity, which he took to be exemplified by the tragic poetry of ancient Greece, was being born out of a rare cooperation between the “Dionysian” spirit of ecstatic intoxication, which imbues the work with vitality and passion, and the “Apollonian” spirit of sober restraint, which tempers chaos with order and form (Nietzsche 1872 [1967]). William James (1842–1910) theorized about creative genius exerts the causal power to change the course of history (Simonton 2018). This is just a glimpse of what each of these philosophers had to say about creativity, and many other figures could be added to their number.

Nevertheless, while some of the topics explored by earlier thinkers have come to occupy a central place in philosophy today—such as freedom, justice, consciousness, and knowledge—creativity is not among them. Indeed, “philosophy of creativity” is still a neologism in most quarters, just as, for example, “philosophy of action” and “philosophy of gender” were not too long ago. However, philosophical work on creativity has been picking up steam over the last two decades (as shown, for example, in a few important collections of essays: B. Gaut & Livingston 2003; Krausz, Dutton, & Bardsley 2009; Paul & Kaufman 2014; B. Gaut & Kieran 2018). We’ll now dive into those contributions, along with earlier work, beginning with what is perhaps the most basic question one can ask in this field.

2. What is Creativity?

As we noted at the outset, the term “creative” can be applied to three kinds of things: a person , a process , or a product (where a product could be an idea, performance, or physical artifact).

Most definitions focus on the product. According to one common approach, persons or processes are creative to the extent that they produce creative products, and a product is creative if it meets two conditions: in addition to being new it must also be valuable . Many theorists argue that novelty is not sufficient, because something can be new but worthless (e.g., a meaningless string of letters), in which case it doesn’t merit the compliment of being called “creative”. Immanuel Kant is often cited as anticipating this definition of creativity in his discussion of (artistic) genius. According to a common interpretation, Kant defines (artistic) genius as the ability to produce works that are not only “original”—since “there can be original nonsense”—but also “exemplary” (Kant 1790: §§43–50 [2000: 182–197]). (Hills & Bird [2018] challenge this reading of Kant.) This definition is so widely accepted among psychologists that it has come to be known as “the standard definition” of creativity in psychology. In practice, “creativity is often not defined” (J.C. Kaufman 2009: 19) in psychological experiments—more on this in §5 below. When psychologists do explicitly adopt a definition, however, they usually say that creative products are not only new, but also valuable in some way, though they variously express the product’s value in terms of its being “useful”, “effective”, “worthwhile”, “fit”, or “appropriate to the task at hand” (Bruner 1962: 18; A. J. Cropley 1967: 67; Jackson & Messick 1965: 313; Kneller 1965: 7; Cattell & Butcher 1968; Heinelt 1974; J.C. Kaufman 2009: 19–20; S.B. Kaufman & Gregoire 2016; Stein 1953; Sternberg & Lubart 1999: 3—for an overview, see Runco & Jaeger 2012). A few psychologists have suggested that the standard definition doesn’t fully capture the concept of creativity (Amabile 1996; Simonton 2012b). As for philosophers, at least one of them defends the standard definition with qualifications (Klausen 2010), but many of them challenge it, as we’ll soon see.

While it is uncontroversial that novelty is required for creativity, philosophers have refined that point. Certain examples may seem, at first, to suggest that novelty isn’t really necessary for creativity. Newton’s discovery of calculus was creative even if, unbeknownst to him at the time, Leibniz got there first—one of many examples of what are called “multiples” in the history of science (Simonton 2004). A beginning student’s idea that freedom is compatible with causal determinism might be creative even if, as she will soon learn, philosophers have been defending such “compatibilist” theories for millennia. However, examples like these do not force us to abandon the novelty requirement, but only to qualify it. Newton’s calculus and the student’s compatibilism were not new in all of history, but they were new to their respective creators, and that is enough for them to count as creative. In the terminology of philosopher Margaret Boden, these ideas are “psychologically creative” (P-creative) even though they are not “historically creative” (H-creative). Notice that P-creativity is more fundamental. Anything that is new in all of history (H-creative) must also be new to its creator (P-creative). Thus, creativity always exhibits psychological novelty, though it doesn’t always exhibit historical novelty.

Again, no one denies that a creative product must be new, at least to its creator. But as we’ll now see, some philosophers depart from the standard definition of creativity by rejecting the value condition ( §2.1 ), or by proposing some further condition(s) ( §2.2 ), or by doing both.

Some theorists have argued that although creative things are valuable, we shouldn’t build value into the definition of creativity, because doing so is not informative or explanatory:

Knowing that something is valuable or to be valued does not by itself reveal why or how that thing is. By analogy, being told that a carburetor is useful provides no explanatory insight into the nature of a carburetor: how it works and what it does. (Stokes 2008: 119; Stokes 2011: 675–76)

Those who maintain that value is required for creativity might reply that it doesn’t need to be informative or explanatory. Being a man is required for being a bachelor even though it’s not informative or explanatory to say that bachelors are men. Stokes notes that “creative” is a term of praise, and uses this point to argue that what is creative must be produced intentionally (since we don’t rightly praise what is unintentional or accidental)—an idea we’ll return to below. But the same point also seems to imply that what is creative must also have value (since we don’t rightly praise what doesn’t have value). And while the concept “carburetor” is value-neutral, as shown by the fact that a carburetor can be worthless or useless (if it’s broken), “creative”, one might argue, is a value-laden concept, like “progress”. Progress necessarily involves novelty or change, but we don’t praise change as progress unless it’s good change. Likewise, defenders of the value condition urge, creativity necessarily involves novelty, but we don’t praise novelty as creative unless it’s good novelty.

Other critics use counterexamples to argue that value isn’t necessary for creativity, the most prominent cases being ones of immoral creativity. (For a collection of essays by psychologists on the phenomenon of immoral or so-called “dark” creativity’, see D. Cropley et al. 2010). Putative cases of immoral creativity include creative accounting to cheat investors or creative testimony to mislead jurors, and the stock example in the literature is creative torture or murder. One can imagine novel and well-designed murders, as Thomas De Quincey once did in a satirical essay:

[S]omething more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed—a knife—a purse—and a dark lane. Design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment, are now deemed indispensable to attempts of this nature. Mr. Williams has exalted the ideal of murder to all of us […] Like Æschylus or Milton in poetry, like Michael Angelo in painting, he has carried his art to a point of colossal sublimity. (De Quincey 1827; see also discussion in Battin et al. 1989)

Innovative ways of inflicting needless agony and craftily designed murders are not good (they have no value), and yet they can be creative. If this is right, then it seems to follow that creativity doesn’t require value.

One way of trying to save the value condition is by flatly denying that torture methods can be creative, and by denying more generally that creative things can be bad (Novitz 1999). But such denial seems ad hoc and implausible—“evil creativity” is not a contradiction in terms—and some have argued that this denial faces other problems besides (Livingston 2018).

Other theorists revise or qualify the value condition in order to accommodate examples of immoral creativity. Paisley Livingston (2018) proposes that a creative product only needs to be instrumentally valuable or “effective” as means to its intended end, regardless of whether that end is morally good, bad, or indifferent. Berys Gaut (2018) distinguishes between something’s being good (or good, period) versus being good of its kind . In his view, a new way of wielding blades and pulleys may be creative if it’s a good of its kind—good as a method of torture—even though it isn’t good. In order for something to count as creative, Gaut says, it doesn’t need to be good; it just needs to be good of its kind.

Alison Hills and Alexander Bird (2018) are unconvinced by such qualifications. They contemplate an elaborate torture device that ends up killing its victims immediately, “without enough suffering on the way”. The device may still be creative, they hold, even though “as a method of torture, it’s no good” (2018: 98). Indeed, they argue, a creative item needn’t be good in any way at all, not even for its creator. The ineffective torture device just described doesn’t satisfy its creator’s preferences, it doesn’t give him pleasure, it isn’t an achievement, it doesn’t contribute at all to his well-being—and yet, they contend, it may be creative, provided that it’s new and was produced in the right way. Exactly what “the right way” amounts to is the topic we turn to next.

2.2 Other proposed conditions

With or without the value condition, some theorists argue that a product must satisfy one or more further conditions, beyond being new, in order to count as creative. The four most prominent proposals are that the product must be (i) surprising, (ii) original (i.e., not copied), (iii) spontaneous, and/or (iv) agential. Each of these is a condition on the process of creativity. To be clear, we are still concerned with what it means for a product to be creative, but the proposals we’ll now consider say that in order for a product to count as creative, it must be brought about in the right way.

Margaret Boden holds that a creative product must be “ new, surprising, and valuable ” (2004: 1; cf. Boden 2010; 2014). It is perhaps most natural to assume that being surprising—like being new and valuable—is a feature of a product. But while Boden does think of creative products as surprising, her interest is more fundamentally in the underlying generative process, in how a creator manages to make something surprising. In her view, there are “three types of creativity”—combinatorial, exploratory, and transformative—“which elicit different forms of surprise, [and] are defined by the different kinds of psychological processes that generate the new structures” (2010: 1, italics added).

Combinatorial creativity occurs when old ideas are combined in new ways. Obvious examples include fictional hybrid creatures or chimeras: add wings to a horse (Pegasus), add the tail of a fish to a woman’s head and upper-body (a mermaid), add a lion’s body to a woman’s head and torso (Sphinx), and so on. Other combinations are found in analogies, such as when Niels Bohr compared an atom to the solar system. The term “combination” can refer either to the product of things combined or to the process of combining them, but Boden’s focus is on the process here, on the fact that one way to generate new ideas is to begin with old ideas and combine them in new ways.

To explain her other two kinds of creativity, Boden invokes the notion of a “conceptual space”, which is roughly a system comprising a set of basic elements (e.g., basic ideas or representations) as well as rules or “constraints” for manipulating or re-combining those elements. A conceptual space is not a painting, song, or poem, for example; it’s a way of creating a painting, song, poem, or theory. The rules or constraints are “the organizing principles that unify and give structure to a given domain of thinking”. And so a conceptual space is

the generative system that underlies that domain and defines a certain range of possibilities: chess moves, or molecular structures, or jazz melodies. (1994: 79)

We could think of a conceptual space as not just a set of thoughts but also a style of thinking defined by rules for generating new thoughts.

“Within a given conceptual space”, Boden observes, “many thoughts are possible, only some of which may have been actually thought” (2004: 4). Some conceptual spaces contain more possibilities than others. Consider different games. Tic-tac-toe is such a simple game that all of its possible moves have already been made many times over. The same is not true in chess, by contrast, which allows for a mind-boggling number of possible moves. The range of possible ideas is also practically inexhaustible in literature, music, the visual and performing arts, as well as the various domains of theoretical inquiry. And within those pursuits, there are various “structured styles of thought”—genres, paradigms, methodological orientations—which Boden thinks of as conceptual spaces.

Boden argues that the elements as well as the operating rules of a conceptual space can be, and in some cases have been, captured in computer programs. She has used this point not only to argue that computers can be creative (a topic we’ll return to below in §5 ), but also to suggest that we should employ the computational model of the mind in order to explain how humans create.

With her notion of conceptual spaces in hand, Boden says that exploratory creativity occurs within a given conceptual space. The new idea that emerges is one that was already possible within that space, because it was permitted by its rules. “When Dickens described Scrooge as ‘a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner,’” Boden writes, “he was exploring the space of English grammar” in which “the rules of grammar allow us to use any number of adjectives before a noun” (Boden 1994: 79). Dickens’s description may strike us somewhat surprising, unexpected, or improbable, but it doesn’t have an air of impossibility about it.

By contrast, Boden argues, another form of creativity does. In this kind of case, the creative result is so surprising that it prompts observers to marvel, “But how could that possibly happen?” (2004: 6). Boden calls this transformational creativity because it cannot happen within a pre-existing conceptual space; the creator has to transform the conceptual space itself, by altering its constitutive rules or constraints. Schoenberg crafted atonal music, Boden says, “by dropping the home-key constraint”, the rule that a piece of music must begin and end in the same key. Lobachevsky and other mathematicians developed non-Euclidean geometry by dropping Euclid’s fifth axiom. Kekulé discovered the ring-structure of the benzene molecule by negating the constraint that a molecule must follow an open curve (Boden 1994: 81–3). In such cases, Boden is fond of saying that the result was “downright impossible” within the previous conceptual space (Boden 2014: 228).

Boden’s definition of creativity has perhaps been most influential among researchers who share her intertest in computer creativity (e.g., Halina 2021; Miller 2019: ch. 3; du Sautoy 2019). In a variation of Boden’s account, one philosopher proposes that what makes a mental process creative is not that it actually involves “the recombination of old ideas or the transformation of one’s conceptual space”, but rather that the creator experiences the process as having one of those features (Nanay 2014).

Maria Kronfeldner (2009; 2018) argues that the process of making something creative must exhibit originality . As she uses the term “original”, it does not simply mean “new”; instead, it has to do with the kind of causal process the creator must employ. She motivates her view by asking why it’s the case that, as we noted earlier, psychological novelty is required for creativity while historical novelty is not. Why is it, for example, that Newton’s invention of calculus was creative even if Leibniz invented it first? The answer, of course, is that it’s because Newton didn’t copy his calculus from Leibniz. Insofar as Newton came up with calculus independently, on his own, then he exhibited originality in his discovery, even though someone else got there first. This originality, Kronfeldner argues, is essential to creativity.

Kronfeldner (2009; 2018) also argues that spontaneity is required for creativity. An idea occurs spontaneously to the extent that it is produced without foresight or intentional control. If you were to foresee the output of the creative process at the beginning of that process, then you wouldn’t need any further process to come up with it. So if an idea is creative, you cannot have fully seen it coming. To that extent, insight comes as a surprise, hence the common phenomenological observation that creative breakthroughs feel like they come unbidden or out of the blue: “Eureka!”, “Aha!”, a lightbulb turns on.

Gaut (2018: 133–137) agrees that creativity requires spontaneity, and he points out, as Kronfeldner does, that it comes in degrees. He explains that you do something spontaneously to the extent that do it without planning it in advance. If you are going to act creatively, he argues, you cannot set out to follow an “exact plan”—a mechanical procedure, routine, or algorithmic rule—which would give you advance knowledge of exactly what the outcome will be and exactly the means you'll take to achieve it. At the outset of a creative act, you have to be to some extent ignorant of the end, or the means, or both. That ignorance opens up room for spontaneity and creativity.

Some philosophers argue that an item does not count as creative unless it has been produced by an agent. Consider a unique snowflake with an intricate shape, a distinctive sunset with stunning layers of red-orange hues, a novel patterning of dunes across a wind-blown desert. All of these things are aesthetically valuable and new. None of them are creative, however, insofar as they all occurred naturally and were not made by an agent. Gaut uses examples like these to argue that creative things must be created by agents (B. Gaut 2018: 129–30; cf. B. Gaut 2010, and B. Gaut 2014b) and several other philosophers agree (Carruthers 2006, 2011; Kieran 2014a, 2014b; Stokes 2008, 2011, 2014; Paul & Stokes 2018).

Of course, many theists would maintain that everything in nature is the handiwork of an agent—namely, God—and so arguably it would make sense for them to regard a natural phenomenon as creative if it is valuable and new. For theists, the unparalleled beauty of nature is a reason to praise the Creator. But this only supports the conceptual point that creativity, by definition, requires agency. We may coherently regard valuable new things as creative if we attribute them to a creative agent, as the theist does with the natural world; otherwise, we can’t. So again, it seems, creativity requires agency.

This leaves open the question of exactly how a creator’s agency must be exercised in order for the result to count as creative. Some philosophers argue that the agent’s act of creation must be intentional . Suppose you are snowboarding on a powder day and, unbeknownst to you, the tracks from your board result in a pleasing new pattern as viewed from high above. The new pattern has aesthetic value, but it isn’t creative. And that is because you didn’t intend to make it. Underlying this intuition, as well as our intuitions about the natural phenomena above, is the fact that “creative” is a term of praise, and we do not extend praise (or blame) for things that are not done by an agent, or for things that an agent doesn’t do in some sense intentionally.

While a number of philosophers endorse some version of the agency requirement for creativity, many theorists make no mention of it, whether to endorse it or reject it, including all of the psychologists cited above. Further, at least two philosophers are willing to attribute creativity to natural phenomena like trees and evolutionary processes: Arnheim (2001) and, in recent work, Boden (2018). These latter theorists don’t discuss agency as such, but insofar as the natural phenomena they call creative are not the result of agency, their view would imply that agency isn’t required for creativity.

The four proposals we’ve just considered all say that a product must arise from a certain kind of process—a process that exhibits surprise, originality, spontaneity, or agency—in order to count as creative. While there is wide agreement among philosophers that creativity requires some special kind of process, not just a special product, there is no consensus on what is required of the process. Of the four process conditions described here, the agency condition seems to be the one that is explicitly endorsed by the greatest number of philosophers thus far, though even they are still just a handful. And as we’ve seen, the other proposed conditions have serious arguments in their favor as well.

Some philosophers argue that if any process requirement is correct, this has an intriguing corollary for judgements about creativity: Even when we are explicitly judging only that a product is creative, we are implicitly assuming something about the process by which it was made. Suppose, for illustration, that the agency requirement is correct—that being generated through an agential process is built into the very concept of a creative product. Suppose further that you are applying that concept competently. It follows that if you come across a captivating arrangement of stones on the beach and you judge it to be creative, you are at least implicitly assuming that it was created through an agential process. If someone later persuades you that the stones happened to be moved into place by the wind and waves, not by any agent but just by chance, then you may still regard the result as aesthetically interesting but you would have to rescind your judgement that it is creative. So if the agency condition is correct, whenever you point to some item and say, “This is creative”, what you are saying, in part is, “This resulted from a creative process”. Furthermore, on this view, analogous implications follow if any other process condition is correct (Paul & Stokes 2018).

Having considered what is required for something to count as a creative product , and whether it must be produced by a certain kind of process , we now turn to analysis of the creative person .

Some theorists suggest that creativity, as an attribute of persons, is an ability to perform creative acts or produce creative things (Boden 2004). Others argue, however, that creativity isn’t merely an ability. An ability is something you can possess without ever putting it to use. You might have the ability to learn Swahili, for example, without ever making the effort to learn that language, despite having ample opportunities to do so. Creativity is different in this regard. If someone has the ability to be creative but never uses that ability when given numerous chances to do so, we would not call that person creative. Creative people are not merely able to act creatively. They are, moreover, disposed to exercise that ability, such that they do act creatively, at least some of the time, when the occasion arises. On this view creativity is a disposition , also referred to as a trait (Grant 2012; cf. B. Gaut 2014b, 2018).

Philosophers have long distinguished virtues as a special subclass of dispositions or traits. In Western philosophy, the tradition of theorizing about virtues goes back to the ancient Greeks, and over the last half-century it has enjoyed a renaissance in ethics (see entry on virtue ethics ) and, more recently, in epistemology (see entry on virtue epistemology ) and aesthetics (Lopes 2008; Roberts 2018; Hills 2018). Traditional examples of virtues include wisdom, justice, temperance, and courage. Should creativity be added to the list?

The answer depends, of course, on what it means for a trait to be a virtue. At the very least, a virtue is a trait that is good or valuable. So whether creativity counts as a virtue in this minimal sense depends on whether creativity is necessarily valuable, a point which is contested, as we saw in the previous section. In fact, those who contend that creativity isn’t necessarily valuable often do so in order to prove that it isn’t a virtue.

But let’s suppose for the sake of argument that creativity is indeed a valuable trait. Is it also a virtue in some more robust sense? Virtue theorists commonly take their cue from Aristotle’s classic discussion in the Nichomachean Ethics . Citing justice and temperance as paradigm virtues, Aristotle asserts that a trait must meet at least three conditions to count as a virtue:

For actions in accord with the virtues to be done temperately or justly it does not suffice that they themselves have the right qualities. Rather, the agent must also be in the right state when he does them. First, he must know [that he is doing virtuous actions]; second he must decide on them, and decide on them for themselves; and thrid, he must also do them from a firm and unchanging state. ( EN II.4, 1105a28–1105a33)

So, for example, if you return something you’ve borrowed, that act exhibits the virtue of justice if and only if (1) you know that you’re returning what you borrowed, (2) you choose to do so because it is the just thing to do, and for no other reason, and (3) you are disposed to do the just thing across the range of circumstances when the opportunity arises. In addition to justice and temperance, Aristotle enumerates other ethical virtues like prudence, generosity, and courage, as well as the intellectual virtue of theoretical wisdom. In his view, each of these traits requires one to meet the three conditions above. While he does not consider whether creativity is a virtue, we may ask whether creativity also has these three criteria. Does one have to meet these three requirements in order to count as creative?

We’ll begin with the third requirement to set it to one side. Does a person’s act count as creative only “if he does it from a fixed and permanent disposition of character”? Examples suggest otherwise. Consider the poet Arthur Rimbaud, who abandoned poetry at the age of 21 to pursue a life of adventure. The fact that he never produced another poem after that does not count against the fact that he was a creative poet in his youth (B. Gaut 2014b). Unlike the Aristotelian virtues, then, creativity does not have to be a permanent disposition.

Even so, it would still be significant if creativity turned out to be like an Aristotelian virtue in meeting the first two requirements. And arguably, creativity does meet the first requirement. A person doesn’t count as doing something creative unless “he knows what he is doing”. This was already implied by the agency condition for creativity discussed earlier.

Where things get interesting is with Aristotle’s second criterion for virtue. In order for your action to count as virtuous, he says, you have to do it “for its own sake”—i.e., you have to do it because you value virtue as an end itself, and not as a means to some external reward like praise, money, status, fame, or winning a competition. Consider the virtue of generosity, for instance. If you give money to someone in need merely because it will make you look good in the eyes of your friends, then you aren’t really being generous. Your act may outwardly look like generosity, but it’s not the real thing. To exhibit real generosity, you have to pursue generosity as an end in itself; you have to help others just for the sake of helping others. Now contrast being generous with being polite. If you compliment your colleague on the good work she’s done, then even if you’re doing this in order to manipulate her, you are being polite to her. You can have an ulterior motive for being polite. So politeness is not a virtue the way generosity is.

Is creativity a virtue in this respect? That is, does being creative require acting creatively for its own sake? Matthew Kieran’s (2014a, 2014b, 2018) answer is a qualified yes. While he grants that you can be motivated by external rewards to exhibit “minimal creativity” in producing valuable new things, he maintains that “exemplary creativity” requires you to be motivated by the value of creativity itself. Thus, in his view, exemplary creativity is a virtue.

To support this claim, Kieran points to a research program in psychology which purports to show that creativity is driven by “intrinsic motivation” rather than “extrinsic motivation”. A classic experiment in this program is “the magic markers study”, in which kids end up producing less creative drawings when they are offered a prize (Lepper et al. 1973). Many other studies have reported similar results, which lead Teresa Amabile to conclude, at first without qualification, that creativity is enhances by intrinsic motivation and hampered by extrinsic motivation (Amabile 1983: 107).

Further research introduced complications. In some studies, subjects were given “immunization techniques” whereby they were first primed or trained to focus on intrinsically motivating factors like the pleasure or aesthetical value of engaging in artistic activities, and it was found that when they engaged in those activities afterward, external rewards actually enhanced their creativity.

As researchers interpreted these findings, offering reward can support one’s intrinsic motivation, provided that the reward works either to boost one’s sense of agency or to provide useful feedback about what’s working and what isn’t. Intrinsic motivation is still what fuels creativity, on this interpretation; rewards help only indirectly, when they reinforce intrinsic motivation. This lead Amabile to revise her hypothesis as the Intrinsic Motivation Principle (IMP):

Intrinsic motivation is conducive to creativity; controlling extrinsic motivation is detrimental to creativity, but informational or enabling extrinsic motivation can be conducive, particularly if initial levels of intrinsic motivation are high. (1996: 107)

Kieran takes this as evidence for his claim that creativity, or at least what he calls exemplary creativity, requires intrinsic motivation and is therefore a virtue in that respect.

Objecting to this proposal, Gaut cites evidence that extrinsic motivation is not always detrimental to creativity. In one study, students in an introductory psychology class came up with more creative short story titles if they were offered a financial reward (Eisenberger & Rhodes 2001). In the studies where immunization techniques were used, proponents of IMP argue that rewards enhance creativity only indirectly, by buttressing intrinsic motivation. But in this case no such techniques were used, and so it seems the prospect of a reward enhanced creativity directly.

Further, Gaut argues that this point coheres with the role that rewards seem to play in so many real-world cases of creative achievement. In their quest to discover the structure of the DNA molecule, Watson and Crick were driven “to imitate Linus Pauling and beat him at his own game” (Watson 1968 [1999: 46]). Picasso and Matisse were both spurred on by their rivalry with each other (Flam 2003: 37). Paul McCready says he was driven to invent his award-winning human-powered glider in 1977 because he needed the prize-money to pay off his debts:

I felt that I didn’t have the time to mess with such things, but I had this strong economic motivation to take an interest in man-powered flight, so I charged around trying to figure out a way to solve it. (quoted in Sternberg & Lubart 1995: 242)

One historian argues that in World War II the Poles beat the French in cracking the Germans’ Enigma Code because they were more terrified of German invasion (Singh 1999: ch. 4). Gaut quips: “Fear of death is a more powerful motivator than the intrinsic satisfactions of code breaking” (Gaut 2014b: 196).

Finally, Gaut points out that even if IMP is true, it is only a causal, probabilistic claim: intrinsic motivation is “conducive” to creativity; extrinsic motivation is “detrimental”. But for a trait to be a virtue, intrinsic motivation must be conceptually necessary for the exercise of that trait. If we learn that someone gave to charity just to enhance his reputation, we conclude that he wasn’t really being generous. By contrast, if we discover that someone created gorgeous artwork just for the fame and glory, we may then lose some of our admiration for her creativity, but we do not deny that she was being creative.

Kieran could remind us that, in his view, intrinsic motivation is not required for all creativity, but only for the special form of it that he calls exemplary creativity. Anticipating this reply, Gaut says that to distinguish between two forms of creativity is just to concede his point. There are not two forms of generosity, one that requires intrinsic motivation and another that does not. If your act of giving isn’t motivated by the right kind of reason, then it doesn’t count as an act of generosity at all. Thus, Gaut argues, to grant the possibility of non-exemplary creativity is to grant that, unlike generosity, creativity isn’t a virtue in the traditional Aristotelian sense.

Another way to examine relations between creativity and virtue is through the lens of virtue epistemology. Linda Zagzebksi defines a virtue

as a deep and enduring acquired excellence of a person, involving a characteristic motivation to produce a certain desired end and reliable success in bringing about that end. (1997: 137, italics added)

While there is a lot packed into this definition, what we’ll pinpoint here is the idea that virtue involves reliable success in achieving a desired end, and that the agent who is epistemically virtuous, in particular, is one who is reliably successful in achieving knowledge. Knowledge requires truth, of course, so an epistemic virtue is a trait that is “truth-conducive”. Epistemologists typically regard a process as truth-conducive to the extent that the beliefs it produces are more often true than false. But Zagzebksi proposes that a process or trait may be truth-conducive in a different sense, insofar as it is necessary for advancing knowledge in some area, even if it produces a very small proportion of true beliefs. Creativity, she claims, is truth-conducive in this sense, and thus it qualifies as an epistemic virtue (1997: 182). Also note the emphasis on agency. In contrast to contemporary western epistemology, virtue epistemology identifies the agent (rather than, say her beliefs) as the essential locus of epistemic valence; it is the agent who is epistemically good (or not). This emphasis comports well with the proposal, discussed above, that the creator’s agency is necessary for genuine creative achievement. A virtue-theoretic approach thus illuminates what may (as we will discuss again later) be essential to creativity, namely, a process that non-trivially involves a responsible agent.

We’ve seen that even after we fix a specific referent for the term “creative”—whether it be a person, process, or product—there are lively disagreements about what it means. These debates often seem to presuppose that the term always expresses the same concept, for which we can seek necessary and sufficient conditions. But we’ve also seen that some theorists distinguish between different concepts of creativity, corresponding to different senses of the term “creative”. In future work we may see theorists develop such pluralistic approaches in more detail. The trick, though, will be to give principled reasons for multiplying different concepts of creativity so that the analyses do not simply reduce to saying that anything goes.

There is a long tradition of thinkers who answer no to the question above. Two of the most influential are from the eighteenth century—Edward Young and Immanuel Kant—who were concerned specifically with genius , the capacity for achieving the very highest levels of creativity. In Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), Young says,

An Original may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of genius; it grows , it is not made …. (1759 [1966: 7])

His idea is that originality emerges naturally from something implanted in us by nature, and it can only be hindered by learning. Young seems to think of learning as proceeding either through imitation or through the following of rules, and both, he thinks, are detrimental to originality. Regarding imitation he writes,

Born Originals , how comes it to pass that we die Copies ? That meddling ape Imitation … destroys all mental individuality…. (1759 [1966: 20])

And insofar as learning is “a great lover of rules”, he warns that it “sets rigid bounds to that liberty, to which genius often owes its supreme glory” (1759 [1966: 13]).

Kant makes similar claims in his Critique of Judgment (1790). Like Young, he takes genius to be a natural capacity, though a very rare one:

such a skill cannot be communicated, but is apportioned to each immediately from the hand of nature and dies with him. (1790: §47 5:309 [2000: 188])

It certainly cannot be learned through imitation:

genius is entirely opposed to the spirit of imitation . Now since learning is nothing but imitation, even the greatest aptitude for learning, facility for learning (capacity) as such, still does not count as genius. (1790: §47 5:308 [2000: 187])

Nor can it be learned through rules, Kant holds, for genius is

the talent (natural gift) that gives the rule to art … the inborn predisposition of the mind ( ingenium ) through which nature gives the rule to art. (1790: §46 5:307 [2000: 186])

For Kant, a genius does not follow rules; a genius invents the rules, indirectly, by creating exemplary works from which other artists might extract rules and undertake “a methodical instruction in accordance with rules” (1790: §49 5:318 [2000: 196]).

Young and Kant are concerned with genius, specifically, but if we extend their reasoning to creativity in general, as Berys Gaut (2014a) has noted, we can discern two lines of argument:

The imitation argument All learning is a form of imitation. Imitating someone or something is incompatible with being creative. So, one cannot learn to be creative. The rules argument All learning consists in the following of rules. Following rules is incompatible with being creative. So, one cannot learn to be creative. (2014a: 266)

Gaut points out, first of all, that both arguments are invalid. In both cases, what the premises would entail is that learning cannot be creative, that, in other words, you cannot learn creatively (a claim about how you can learn). But even if that were true, it wouldn’t follow that you cannot learn to be creative (a claim about what you can learn). If you absorb the advice of a creative writing manual then this act of learning may not itself be creative. But if the manual is effective—and we’ll see in a moment how it can be—then what you will learn is how to become more creative.

Gaut also challenges the premises of these arguments. To start with the first premise of the imitation argument, it simply isn’t true that all learning proceeds through imitation, as we learn many things through direct experience, trial and error, and many other means.

The second premise is also suspect. Something superficially close to it is true: mere copying is incompatible with being creative. But to the extent that we learn from others by imitating them, this is not merely a matter of copying them. When a child learns to speak the language of those around her, she doesn’t simply parrot the exact same sentences she hears; she absorbs the vocabulary and underlying grammar in a way that enables her to form new sentences of her own devising.

Now for the rules argument. Contrary to the first premise, it cannot be the case that all learning consists in following rules, Gaut argues, because for any given rule there will be hard cases where it is unclear whether or how the rule applies to them, and so an individual still has to use her own judgment in applying the rule.

The second premise is false too. Recall the distinction from §3 above between two kinds of rules. An algorithm serves as an exact plan, specifying both the outcome and the path for getting to it in exact detail. In contrast, a heuristic is a looser “rule of thumb” that leaves room for an agent to exercise her own judgment, choice, and creativity in determining whether, when, and how to follow the rule. While algorithms, in this sense, may preclude creativity, heuristics do not, which is why, as we’ll see below, the teaching of creativity so often takes the form of heuristics.

There is a sense in which the question at hand can be answered empirically: We can show that creativity can be taught simply by pointing to cases where it has been taught. Gaut himself discusses such examples as they occur in mathematics and fiction writing, which we’ll turn to below. But while such cases may suffice to show that creativity can be taught, Gaut further enriches our understanding by explaining how this is possible . He does so partly by articulating and then debunking the imitation and rules arguments to the contrary. But in addition, he offers the following positive argument to show that creativity can be taught and learned. He calls it “the constitutive argument” because it begins with his view of what constitutes or defines creativity itself.

The constitutive argument

• Creativity is a disposition—involving both the ability and the motivation —to produce things that are new and valuable, and to do so in ways that express one’s agency through “the exercise of choice, evaluation, understanding, and judgment” (Gaut 2014a: 273).
• At least some people can learn to enhance their creative motivation .
• At least some people can learn to enhance their creative abilities .
• So, at least some people can learn to become more creative.

Premise 1 recapitulates the point we’ve already seen Gaut and others defend (in §2.3 above), that creativity is not merely an ability but a disposition or trait, whereby the creative person is disposed or motivated to exercise that ability when given the opportunity.

In support of premise 2, Gaut argues that you can strengthen both your intrinsic motivation to be creative (when you take pleasure in your creative activities), as well as your extrinsic motivation to be creative (when you are rewarded with praise, grades, pay, etc. for your creative efforts).

Defending premise 3, Gaut points out that you can develop your ability to produce valuable new things by practising and strengthening the relevant skills. And this development can be substantially aided by learning certain heuristics.

Heuristics are indeed a staple of education in creative pursuits from mathematics (draw the figure; consider special cases; consider extreme cases; generalize the problem; look for a related problem, etc.—see Pólya 1945; Schoenfeld 1982, 1987a, 1987b) to creative writing (write what you know; be specific and detailed in describing sensory experiences; practice seeing similarities between dissimilar things; show, don’t tell, etc.—see Bell & Magrs 2001; Anderson 2006; Maybury 1967; S. Kaufman & J. Kaufman 2009). Gaut also identifies several heuristics that might be used to foster creativity in philosophy, even among children (cf. M. Gaut 2010; B. Gaut & M. Gaut 2011).

With this last theme, Gaut has a kindred spirit in Alan Hájek (2014, 2016, 2017, 2018), who has independently proposed that by using various heuristics, philosophers can enhance their abilities to make valuable contributions to their field, including ideas that are distinctively creative. It has been said that anyone of average talent can become a strong chess player by learning and internalizing certain chess heuristics: “castle early”, “avoid isolated pawns”, etc. Analogously, Hájek suggests, philosophy has a wealth of heuristics— philosophical heuristics —although they have not been as well documented and studied. Sometimes these take the form of useful heuristics for generating counterexamples, such as “check extreme cases”. Sometimes they suggest ways of generating new arguments out of old ones, as in “arguments involving possibility can often be recast as arguments involving time, or space”. Sometimes they provide templates for positive arguments (e.g., ways of showing that something is possible). Hájek offers a catalogue of such philosophical heuristics to show that, contrary to a common assumption, creativity, even in philosophy, can be compatible with, and enhanced by, following rules.

Upon observing the work of creative people, it is natural to wonder: How do they do that? How do people create? The issue we turn to now is whether we could, at least in principle, answer this question scientifically, using the methods of modern empirical psychology and other cognitive and behavioral sciences. Those who take a negative stance on this matter are not merely saying that, in practice, it would be exceedingly difficult for science to explain creativity. They are saying that it’s altogether impossible that science could ever explain creativity.

Hospers (1985) defends this kind of pessimism based on the variety and complexity of creativity, given that creativity occurs not only in art, but in science, theorizing of any sort, engineering, business, medicine, sport, gaming, and so on. At least two worries may follow. First, given the complexity of any one of these individual domains, one might worry that there are simply too many variables to allow for a clear explanation. Art provides a paradigmatic example. Consider an artwork that you judge to be masterful (a sculpture, a painting, a film). Now imagine attempting to describe or identify all the reasons for which you think it is masterful. Take as much time as you like but, the skeptic will urge, any long description you construct will invariably strike you as woefully incomplete by comparison to the artwork, and the experience thereof. So, if the creative achievements of artists, in all of their complexity, cannot even be adequately described, we have little reason to think that such achievements can be explained.

How can theorists respond to these skeptical worries? Both the complexity and generalizability worries might be partially disarmed by noting analogies between creativity and other phenomena. For instance, consider the range of bodily movement involved in some of the very domains of activities listed above: art, science, engineering, medicine, sport. The kinds of bodily action specific to these domains are complex and vary dramatically: the relevant physical movements of the surgeon are much different from the tennis player. However, it is not plausible that this complexity and variety precludes explanation of bodily action in those domains. It simply implies that some features of the explanation will be context-sensitive, that is, specific to that domain of activity. And further to the analogy: the fact that the long description of, say, the tennis serve is incomplete does not preclude it from being apt and explanatory. If this line of reasoning is sound for bodily action, why not also for creative action?

At this point, one might argue that while complexity and generalizability worries would only show that creativity is difficult to explain in practice, the very nature of creativity implies, more strongly, that it could never be explained, not even in principle. Resources to support this kind of pessimism may be adduced from various past philosophers. We need to tread carefully, however, since most of the figures we are about to consider were writing long before the rise of the relevant sciences, so they could not have made any explicit claim either way as to whether creativity could be explained by those sciences. Nevertheless, some of them did make claims which entail, or seem to entail, that creativity simply isn’t the kind of thing that could be explained through scientific inquiry as we understand it today.

The classic expression of such a view comes from Plato. In his dialogues, Plato features his teacher Socrates as a spokesperson for his own views, and in the Ion he has Socrates argue that poets do not produce poetry through knowledge or skill. When you exercise a skill ( technē ), you apply techniques, rules, or methods to perform a given activity, like charioteering, fishing, or commanding an army. In principle, one could explain these activities by identifying the techniques they involve, and a student or apprentice could learn these activities by applying and practicing those techniques. But poetry is not like that, in Socrates’ view. A poet can only imitate the application of rules or techniques, mimicking the surface appearance of skill. Voicing an idea that was familiar in Ancient Greek culture, Socrates suggests that poetry emerges instead through divine inspiration, whereby a human being is inspired —literally “filled with a spirit”, with a god or goddess, with a muse:

You know, none of the epic [or lyric] poets, if they’re good, are masters of their subject; they are inspired, possessed, and that is how they utter all those beautiful poems. … [They] are not in their right minds when they make those beautiful lyrics, but as soon as they sail into harmony and rhythm they are possessed by Bacchic frenzy. […] For a poet is an airy thing, winged and holy, and he is not able to make poetry until he becomes inspired and goes out of his mind and his intellect is no longer in him. As long as a human being has his intellect in his possession he will always lack the power to make poetry or sing prophecy. […] You see, it’s not mastery [ technē ] that enables them to speak those verses, but a divine power. That’s why the god takes their intellect away from them when he uses them as his servants, as he does prophets and godly diviners, so that we who hear should know that they are not the ones who speak those verses that are of such high value, for their intellect is not in them: the god himself is the one who speaks, and he gives voice through them to us. In this more than anything, then, I think, the god is showing us, so that we should be in no doubt about it, that these beautiful poems are not human, not even from human beings, but are divine and from gods; that poets are nothing but representatives of the gods, possessed by whoever possesses them. ( Ion 534a-d)

Socrates repeats this view in the Phaedrus : “Some of the greatest blessings come by way of madness, indeed madness that is heaven-sent” (244a). He adds that while a poet may have some kind of skill, anyone who aspires to make poetry purely by skill, without the madness or the muse, will fail (245a).

It’s important to note that “madness”, for Plato, is a supernatural affair. From the vantage of contemporary behavioral science, we think of madness—or rather, mental illness—as a pathology arising from some combination of genetic and environmental factors, and those factors can be studied scientifically. So even if creativity is linked to mental illness—a highly controversial proposition—it could still be entirely within the scope of science. However, Plato’s talk of “madness” does not refer to any naturally occurring pathology, but rather to the result of divine intervention: the poet is taken over or “possessed” by the muse and that is precisely why he is “out of his mind”. Plato’s poet suffers divine madness.

According to this story, then, the person we call a poet isn’t really a creator of poetry, but is merely the vessel through which a divine being delivers poetry. If it is literally true that the source of poetry is supernatural, then poetic creativity could never be explained by science, which is limited to the investigation of natural causes. (For more on Plato, see Asmis 1992.)

This kind of supernaturalism has enjoyed a long afterlife in Western thought. In ancient Rome, the Latin term “ genius ” referred to a guiding spirit that was thought to accompany each person throughout their lives. The genius of an artist would occasionally deliver art through that person in the manner of Platonic inspiration.

Conceptions of the artist take a new turn when the idea of genius is transformed in the eighteenth century. As we saw above, Immanuel Kant defines genius as a natural capacity that a certain kind of artist possesses innately and which partly constitutes that artist’s identity. So rather than saying that a gifted artist “has a genius”, Kant says that such a person “is a genius”. What distinguishes the genius is fundamentally an imaginative capacity—an ability to engage in a “free play” of imagination to produce artworks of “exemplary originality”. These works are exemplary not only in the sense that they have artistic or aesthetic value, unlike “original nonsense”; they are also exemplary in the more radical sense of providing an exemplar—a new paradigm and precedent—for lesser artists to follow. A work of genius sets a new standard of artistic value, and, looking to that exemplar, lesser artists may then extract techniques or rules for their own craft. The genius therefore “gives the rule to art”. In creating such works, the genius does not follow any rules or methods. Instead the genius creates art through a “free play of imagination”—where the terms “free” and “play” characterize the nature of an activity unconstrained by any pre-established methods or rules:

[G]enius … is a talent for producing that for which no determinate rule can be given, not a predisposition of skill for that which can be learned in accordance with some rule …. (1790: §46 5:307–8; 2000 trans., 186)

Kant thought that genius, so conceived, is limited to the fine arts, poetry being chief among them. Meanwhile, in Kant’s view, there is no room for genius in science, for example, where good theories and hypotheses must emerge from the careful application of scientific method, and so he said that even Isaac Newton, “that great man of science”, was not a genius. We’ll soon consider why this view might seem to entail that creativity is inexplicable, but first it will be helpful to bring another figure, Arthur Schopenhauer, who was deeply influenced both by Kant and by Plato.

Like Kant, Schopenhauer thought of genius as a natural capacity that is limited to the fine arts. He also echoes Plato’s sentiments about madness, famously stating that “genius and madness have a side where they touch and even pass over into each other” ( The World as Will and Representation , 1859, WWV I: 190), and that “Genius lives only one storey above madness” ( Parerga and Paralipomena , SW 2:53, PP 2:49). In a state of madness, Schopenhauer’s genius is like Plato’s poet in experiencing a momentary loss of self, but what displaces the self is not any divine being but rather a pure Idea which seizes the author’s being and becomes the object of both his fascination and his artistic expression:

We lose ourselves entirely in this object, to use a pregnant expression; in other words, we forget our individuality, our will, and continue to exist only as pure subject, as clear mirror of the object, so that it is as though the object alone existed without anyone to perceive it, and thus we are no longer able to separate the perceiver from the perception, but the two have become one, since the entire consciousness is filled and occupied by a single image of perception. ( World WWV I: 178–179, §34).

With their focus on genius construed as a natural capacity, figures like Kant and Schopenhauer abandon the supernaturalism of the Platonic muse. Nevertheless, they retain the idea that creativity—specifically genius-level creativity in the fine arts—is not a matter of exercising a skill or applying given rules, methods, or techniques.

As we noted earlier, these figures did not and could not have explicitly denied that creativity could be explained by the sciences of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but they are commonly taken to represent such a denial (Kronfeldner 2018). Why?

Perhaps figures like Kant and Schopenhauer seem to make creativity, or at least creative genius, inexplicable insofar they suppose it to be innate and as they have no story to tell about how one came to acquire an innate capacity except to say that it was either an accident of chance (which is no explanation at all) or a gift from God (which again is not a scientific explanation). But while these figures seemed to think of artistic genius as being endowed entirely by nature with no contribution from nurture, modern genetic theory rejects that dichotomy. Instead of positing all-or-nothing natural abilities, behavioral scientists today think in terms of genetically inherited predispositions. In order for a genetic predisposition to develop into a trait with an observable phenotype, it needs to be triggered and shaped through a complex interaction between an organism’s genes and certain kinds of stimuli or environmental conditions. There are still open questions about exactly how, and how much, genes and environment feed into the development of any given trait, but it’s misguided to pose the binary nature-versus-nurture question as if the two were mutually exclusive (see Tabery 2014). Many researchers agree that some people have a stronger natural predisposition toward creativity than others, and that genius-level creativity partly stems from such a predisposition. Even so, the predisposition itself can be understood scientifically in terms of genetic heritability. (For a sampling of the relevant studies, see the essays collected in S.B. Kaufman 2013.)

Perhaps creativity seems inexplicable according to these accounts because it doesn’t follow rules or methods. In order to explain how to do something—how to build a boat or lead an army etc.—perhaps I need to be able to identify the rules or methods you should follow in order to practice and apply those skills. How-to explanations are instructions. But scientific explanations needn’t be instructions. A lot of good science explains how something happens—e.g., how heat melts ice or how a bat navigates its environment by echolocation—without explaining how to do it yourself.

Perhaps creativity seems inexplicable according to these accounts because creators themselves do not know how they create. But a scientific explanation needn’t be available through introspection. Most people cannot explain how their own digestive, circulatory, or perceptual systems work, but scientists who study those systems can.

Another line of thought is perhaps implicit in Kant but comes to the fore in Schopenhauer, who says that “the nature of genius consists precisely in the preeminent ability” to

consider things independently of the principle of sufficient reason , in contrast to the way of considering which proceeds in exact accordance with this principle, and is the way of science and experience. ( World WWV: I: 192, §36)

The principle of sufficient reason says that for every fact there is a cause which completely explains that fact. So the defining ability of genius is to see things in a way that transcends the causal order and defies all explanation.

A version of this view is defended more recently by Carl Hausman (1975 [1984], 1979, 1985) who frames it in terms of novelty that creativity involves. Hausman asserts that if a product is creative, it must be metaphysically novel (or in his terms, “genuinely novel”) in the sense that it cannot be predicted from, or explained by, prior events—not even in principle. Creativity is therefore incompatible with causal determination and causal explanation: “A causal view of explanation sets a framework for ways of denying that there is anything new under the sun” (Hausman 1984: ix). If something can be explained by prior causes, it is not metaphysically novel, and is therefore, in Hausman’s view, not truly creative.

Against Hausman’s skeptical charge, Maria Kronfeldner (2009) argues that creativity is compatible with causal determination. First, causal determinism does not preclude novelty or change. Determinism says the emergence of new kinds of things can at least in principle be predicted in advance. Importantly, though, when this prediction becomes true, then something new is added to the world. Of course, not all novelty instantiates creativity. The question is whether the kind of novelty involved in creativity must be metaphysical novelty, which is by definition incompatible with causal determination. This is doubtful. Notice that, by definition, metaphysical novelty defies natural laws. The production of something metaphysically novel would therefore require supernatural powers. Traditional Western religions conceive of God as performing the miracle of creation ex nihilo . But are we positing a miracle every time we describe a human artifact or achievement as creative? Surely not. As noted above, human creativity is manifest in things that are novel relative to the agent producing them or new to human history, but both of those kinds of novelty (psychological and historical) are perfectly compatible with causal determination. As Kronfeldner explains, creativity does not preclude causes in general; it only precludes certain kinds of causes. A creative product, she argues, must be original —which means that it cannot be produced through a process of copying something prior. And it must be spontaneous (not produced through a routine or mechanical procedure)—which means that it is to some extent independent of the agent’s intentional control and previously acquired knowledge. (For more on originality and spontaneity, recall §2.2 above). Intuitively, the causes of something creative cannot simply be a matter of copying or following a routine. But it may have causes nonetheless, and cognitive science can investigate those causes, at least in principle. Indeed, as we’ll see next, it is doing so in practice.

5. The Cognitive Science of Creativity

Although creativity has been relatively understudied by contemporary philosophers, as we noted in §1 , it has been receiving a great deal of attention from psychologists over the past few decades. In 1950, J. P. Guilford gave a presidential address at the American Psychological Association calling for research on the topic, and the field soon took off with waves of research investigating the traits and dispositions of creative personalities; the cognitive and neurological mechanisms at play in creative thought; the motivational determinants of creative achievement; the range of institutional, educational, and environmental factors that enhance or inhibit creativity; and more. Today, the blossoming of this field can be seen in the flurry of popular writing on its results; an official division of the American Psychological Association for the psychology of aesthetics, creativity, and the arts (Division 10); numerous academic conferences; dedicated peer-reviewed journals ( Psychology of Aesthetics , Creativity and the Arts ; Creativity Research Journal ; Journal of Creative Behavior ; International Journal of Creativity and Problem Solving ); special issues of journals ( Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences , Takeuchi & Jung 2019); literature surveys (Hennessey & Amabile 2010; Runco & Albert 2010; Runco 2017; Glaveanu 2014; Williams et al. 2016); textbooks (J.C. Kaufman 2009; Sawyer 2012; R. W. Weisberg 1986, 2006); and a comprehensive encyclopedia (Runco & Pritzker 2020). According to one overview, creativity has been studied by nearly all of the most eminent psychologists of the twentieth century, and “the field can only be described as explosive” (Albert & Runco 1999: 17). There is also a groundswell of new work on creativity in the fields of computer science, artificial intelligence (AI), and robotics.

The present section surveys empirical work in psychology along with some related work in neuroscience, while the next section ( §6 ) covers research in computing, AI, and robotics. Throughout, we’ll see that philosophers are actively in dialogue with these fields under the broad, interdisciplinary umbrella of cognitive science.

The vast body of empirical research of creativity can be seen as addressing a variety of issues, but the central question that concerns us here is the one we identified above as the challenge for explaining creativity: How are people creative? This question is analogous to a number of other questions in cognitive science: How do people perceive through sense modalities such as vision? How do they form concepts? How do they acquire a language? How do they make inferences? Just as psychologists investigate the psychological and neurological processes, systems, and mechanisms at work in these other mental operations, as well as the internal and external factors that either enhance or hinder these operations, they are doing the same for creativity. There is no pretension to achieving a complete explanation which would include each and every causal factor, and provide the basis for perfectly predicting creative outcomes in advance. But to the extent that we identify some of the relevant causal factors involved in creativity we thereby make progress in explaining creativity, just as we do with other features of the mind.

As we noted in §2 , the standard definition of creativity in psychology says that a product (idea or artefact) is creative to the extent that it is both new and valuable (“effective”, “useful” or “appropriate”), and, in turn, people and processes are creative to the extent that they produce new and valuable things. As we also noted, many psychologists do not actually employ this, or any, definition of creativity in conducting their research. In one sampling of studies of creativity published in peer-reviewed psychology journals, only 38% of them included an explicit definition of creativity (Plucker, Beghetto, & Dow 2004), as they rely in one way or another on the assumption that we know it when we see it. For example, many studies use the Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT), whereby experimental subjects produce things that are then rated for how creative they are by a panel of experts in the relevant field; so paintings are rated by professional painters, stories by published authors, etc. Many other research methodologies are used, as we’ll see below.

Empirical research on creativity departs in several ways from the traditional approaches that seemed to place creativity outside the scope of science. For starters, in stark contrast to Plato’s supernaturalism, empirical psychologists take creativity to be a completely natural phenomenon. Creative people may of course be “inspired” in the sense of feeling energized or filled with ideas, but rather than being literally “breathed into” by some god or muse, their thoughts and behaviors are presumed to have causes that are perfectly natural. While it is difficult in practice to identify these causes, they are not in principle beyond the reach of science.

Further, the range of phenomena that contemporary researchers countenance within the ambit of creativity is far broader and more diverse than the traditional focus on poetry and the fine arts, as creativity can be manifest in any kind of art or craft, as well as in the sciences, technology, entrepreneurship, cooking, humor, or indeed in any domain where people come up with ideas or things that are novel and valuable in some way or another. Departing from Kant, genius, the highest echelon of creativity, may be acknowledged in virtually any of these domains, not just in the fine arts. And while a few researchers (e.g., Simonton 1984, 1994, 1997, 2009; Root-Bernstein & Root-Bernstein 1999) venture to examine genius (so-called “Big-C” creativity), most of them focus instead on relatively ordinary creative feats (“little-c” creativity) including the kinds of story-making, drawing, and problem-solving that can be elicited on command from regular people in experimental settings. Some researchers propose that in order to understand how the mind generates new ideas, we should begin with even more rudimentary phenomena. For example, philosopher Jesse Prinz and psychologist Lawrence Barsalou focus on how we form new concepts to categorize the things we perceive, a process which they claim is creative, albeit in a “mundane” rather than “exceptional” way (Prinz & Barsalou 2002; Barsalou & Prinz 1997; cf. Child 2018).

Of course, many feats of human creativity, and the ones that are most interesting, go far beyond the basic formation of concepts. A major step toward explaining those feats is to recognize that what we call “the creative process”, as if it were a single, homogenous phenomenon, is in fact an assembly of multiple stages or operations. The simplest recognition of this fact is the Geneplore model which distinguishes just two stages: generating ideas and exploring ideas (Finke 1996; Smith, Ward, & Finke 1995). This distinction may be seen as echoing one made by philosophers of science in the early twentieth century, between the context of discovery and the context of justification (Popper 1934). Other theorists posit up to eight stages of creativity (for a summary of proposals, see Sawyer 2012: 89). But the most influential stage-theory traces back to Henri Poincaré’s lecture, “Mathematical Creation” (1908 [1913: 383–394]), in which he identifies four phases in his own innovative work as a mathematician:

• conscious hard work or preparation ,
• unconscious incubation ,
• illumination , and
• verification .

In his book, The Art of Thought (1926), the psychologist Graham Wallas endorses Poincaré’s four stages with corroborating evidence from the personal reports of other eminent scientists like Hermann von Helmholtz. Wallas’s scheme, as a development of Poincaré’s, is still the one that is most widely cited, and we employ a version of it here with some slightly different terminology and with two more substantive alterations: instead of “incubation”, we identify the second operation more generally as the “generation” of ideas, which may include unconscious incubation but may also occur in conscious, deliberate thought; and we add “externalization” for a total of five operations:

• Preparation —You invest a great deal of effort learning and practicing in order to acquire the knowledge, skills, and expertise required for work in a given domain.
• Generation —You produce new ideas, whether through conscious reflection or unconscious incubation.
• Insight —You consciously experience the emergence of a new idea, which would strike you with a feeling of surprise: “Aha!”, “Eureka!”
• Evaluation – You assess the idea to determine whether it should be discarded, retained, revised, or amended.
• Externalization —You express your idea in a concrete, observable form.

Artists provide compelling examples (though not the only ones) of each of these five operations. Such examples can be especially illustrative since they come straight from the artists’ mouths, as they reflect upon, and share, their creative process. The twentieth century painter Jacob Lawrence was known for painting in the style of visual narratives. Lawrence developed a system, much like a filmmaker’s storyboard, for the preparation of these paintings. He would lay as many as 60 wood panels on the studio floor, each with individual scenes and sometimes with captions. From these storyboards, Lawrence would generate and evaluate ideas and insights for a visual narrative, culminating in the paintings such as those in his Migration Series (see Whitney Museum, 2002, in Other Internet Resources ). Toni Morrison, the Nobel prize winning novelist, remarks on the labors and sustained effort required at the preparation, generation, evaluation, and externalization stages of a creative writing process. Commenting on her novel Jazz , she says,

I thought of myself as like the jazz musician—someone who practices and practices and practices in order to be able to invent and to make his art look effortless and graceful. I was always conscious of the constructed aspect of the writing process, and that art appears natural and elegant only as a result of constant practice and awareness of its formal structures.

She further notes that insight does not always come in a flash,

[I]t’s a sustained thing I have to play with. I always start out with an idea, even a boring idea, that becomes a question I don’t have any answers to. (T. Morrison 1993)

Writer Ishmael Reed claims that insight can come unexpectedly and in various contexts:

One can find inspiration from many sources. The idea of Japanese by Spring originated in a news item that claimed the endowment to a major university was traced to Japanese mob, the Yakuza. Flight to Canada began as a poem. The Terrible series began when I heard someone at party mention that there was a black figure, Black Peter, in the Dutch Christmas, and by coincidence I was invited to the Netherlands shortly afterwards, where I witnessed the arrival of Saint Nicholas and Peter on a barge that floated into Amsterdam with crowds looking on. I took photos of the ceremony …. (Howell 2020: 91)

And with signature profundity, James Baldwin suggested that all elements of the creative artistic process, from preparation to externalization, require a basic enabling condition: being (and willing to be) alone (Baldwin 1962).

As Wallas recognized (1926: 81), and as the above examples suggest, the “stages” of the creative process are not necessarily discrete steps that follow one another in a tidy sequence. Creative work is messy: over time you have numerous ideas, keeping some and abandoning others in multiple rounds of trial-and-error; you incubate new ideas for one problem while you’re busy externalizing your ideas for another; and your moments of insight, evaluation, and externalization trigger further generative processes that send you cycling through these operations many times over. It’s still important to distinguish these operations, however, because, as researchers are confirming, they are enabled and influenced by different causal factors.

Among the additional stages that researchers have posited, one of the most widely discussed is known as problem-finding. Psychologists often conceptualize creative thought in terms of problem-solving: the ideas generated within the creative process are seen as candidate solutions to a given problem—where “problems” are broadly construed to include any creative aim, like that of producing a particular kind of artwork or proving a particular theorem, etc. (Flavell & Draguns 1957: 201; Newell, Shaw, & Simon 1962). But following some early work by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (1965), many researchers came to appreciate that a lot of creative work is done not just in solving problems but in finding the right problem to begin with (Abdulla et al. 2020; Csikszentmihalyi & Getzels 1970; Getzels 1965; Getzels & Csikszentmihalyi 1975). While we agree that problem-finding often plays a key role in creativity, we have not assigned it to a separate stage, for the following reasons. Consider that you might settle on a problem to work on in either of two ways. On one hand, you might choose a problem to work on from a pre-existing menu of options. In that case, your choice would fall under the evaluation phase; it’s just that the idea you select is a problem that calls for the pursuit of further ideas. If, on the other hand, you develop a new problem, you would thereby be engaging in the generation of a new idea—the new problem—which may emerge in a moment of insight . Einstein and his colleague celebrated the novelty in such problem-finding:

The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science. (Einstein & Infeld 1938: 92)

Either way—whether you “find” a problem by picking a pre-existing one or by coming up with a new one yourself—problem-finding, though important, does not need to be seen as an additional operation beyond the five listed above; it’s just a special case of generation, insight, or evaluation.

The next five sub-sections will respectively examine the five operations of creative work. Notice that three of them—preparation, evaluation, and externalization—are uncontroversially ordinary activities that involve no apparent mystery; it’s a challenge to explain them but no one is tempted to regard them as inexplicable or as violating the laws of nature. As we saw in §4 , traditional skepticism about the possibility of explaining creativity is really focused on the two remaining phenomena: the generation of new ideas ( §5.2 ) and the experience of insight whereby an idea seems to come out of the blue, as if from a god ( §5.3 ).

It’s myth that outsiders are more creative. To put yourself in a position to create anything of value, you have to spend a great deal of time and effort acquiring the relevant knowledge, skills, and expertise. In what has come to be called “the ten-year rule”, Howard Gardner (1993) found that, on average, people spend about 10 years learning and being immersed in a domain before they make any significant creative contribution to it.

Though a certain amount of rote learning is required, gaining mastery in a field is not simply a matter of passively absorbing information. Much of it involves what Anders Ericsson calls deliberate practice, where you focus on tasks which are a little beyond your current abilities, but which you eventually conquer through feedback and repetition. Across a variety of domains—including physics, medicine, programming, dance, and music—Ericsson found that, on average, world-class performance becomes possible for people only after 10,000 hours of deliberate practice in their chosen activity. This finding also converges on the ten-year rule, because if you engage in deliberate practice four hours a day, five days a week, that would add up to 10,000 hours in ten years (Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Römer 1993; Ericsson et al. 2006).

However, there seems to be a point at which too much formal training can dampen creativity. Simonton (1984: 70–73) has reported that the relationship between creativity and education level is an inverted-U, as too much schooling can reinforce familiar, pre-established styles of thought. Even so, the point remains that, before you run into diminishing returns, years of preparatory learning and practice are required for exceptional creativity.

5.2 Generation

In this section we discuss four kinds of mental capacities or processes that researchers have posited for generating new ideas.

Psychologist Donald T. Campbell (1960, 1965) proposed that creative thought proceeds through “blind variation and selective retention (BVSR)”. The “variations” he refers to are the various ideas that might occur to a creator, and the process of generating them is “blind” to the extent that it is not guided or directed by prior knowledge of how valuable or useful they will be: “Real gains must have been the products of explorations going beyond the limits of foresight or prescience , and in this sense blind” (Campbell 1960: 92, emphasis added). Once ideas have been generated, however, there is a subsequent stage where the creator selectively retains some of those ideas while discarding others, and Campbell says this stage is “sighted” rather than blind since it is guided by the creator’s judgments as to which ideas are valuable. While there is little debate that selective retention is sighted in this sense, there has been more controversy over whether the initial production of ideas is, by contrast, blind.

In his prolific body of work, Dean Keith Simonton has extended and refined Campbell’s proposal. His work nicely illustrates the interdisciplinary nature of creativity research as he, like Campbell, is a psychologist who engages with philosophers, some of whom are broadly sympathetic to the BVSR theory (Briskman, 2009; Nickles, 2003), while others are skeptical (Kronfeldner 2010, 2011, 2018). In earlier writings Simonton suggested, in a way Campbell did not, that BVSR is to be understood on the model of Darwinian evolution (Simonton 1999a, 1999b). But Simonton (forthcoming: 2–3) has come to rescind the Darwinian framing of BVSR, conceding that it is misleading. Reprising Campbell’s core idea, he says that a process of generating an idea is blind to the extent that it is not guided by “the creator’s prior knowledge of the variation’s utility” (Simonton forthcoming: 5; cf. Simonton 2011, 2012a, 2012b, 2018). He stresses that blindness is not all-or-nothing; it comes in degrees. An example of a highly sighted process is that of using the quadratic formula to find the roots of a quadratic equation: you know in advance that if you apply the formula correctly, it will yield the correct answer. Examples of relatively blind processes include remote association and mind wandering.

Despite the foregoing criticism of BVSR, recent neuroscientific studies suggest a network of brain activity that may serve the blind variation role. Brain activity doesn’t cease when one is not focusing on a task, when one is at rest, daydreaming, and so on. Following this insight, researchers have used neuroimaging methods to identify what is now called the default mode network (DMN). The precise anatomy of this network is still a matter of investigation, but it is supposed to be less active when one is focused on an external task (say a problem in the real world or in the lab) and more active when one is not so focused (Raichle et al. 2001; Buckner & DiNicola 2019). Notice then, that while this network is not creativity-specific—it is supposed to be active during memory recall, imagining future events, daydreaming, and so on—it does seem especially well-suited for creativity, and particularly for the random idea generation hypothesized by the BVSR (Jung et al. 2013). Creativity researchers in these fields often refer to this more “free” production of ideas as “divergent thinking”, and some argue on the basis of neuroimaging studies that creative thought requires cooperation between this mode of thought as well as that under “executive control”. As one team puts the point,

In general, we contend that the default network influences the generation of candidate ideas, but that the control network can constrain and direct this process to meet task-specific goals via top-down monitoring and executive control.. (Beaty, Benedek, et al. 2016; see also Mayseless, Eran, & Shamay-Tsoory 2015; Beaty, Seli, & Schacter 2019; Chrysikou 2019)

Notice how well this comports with both the Geneplore and the BVSR frameworks, perhaps identifying a way to keep some of the insights of both without commitment to a special creativity mechanism after all.

At least since Kant, theorists have identified an important link between creativity and imagination; indeed, the two are sometimes unfortunately conflated. Construed broadly, imagination can take various forms: sensory imagery, propositional imagination, supposition, free association. Berys Gaut (2003, 2009, 2010) and Stokes (2014, 2016) have both recently argued that, although imagination and creativity are distinct, imagination is especially well-suited to creative thought because of its characteristic flexibility. They both agree that imagination is decoupled from action (Gaut 2003) and “non-truthbound” (Stokes 2014) in the sense that, unlike belief, imagination is not limited by the proper function of accurately representing (some part of) the world. This freedom or playfulness of imagination is crucial to generating new ideas, since it allows one to safely “try out” hypotheses, conceptual combinations, strategies for solutions, and so on, without epistemic or behavioral commitment.

A series of studies illustrates both the need for non-truthbound capacities in creative thought, as well as the difficulty of employing them. When people—children and adults alike—are asked to imagine and draw non-existent houses, people, or animals, they depict things that are strikingly similar to their familiar counterparts in the real world: imagined people, for example, were generally drawn with some version of a head, limbs, eyes, and so forth. (Karmiloff-Smith 1990, 1992: 155–61; Cacciari et. al 1997; Ward 1994, 1995). This suggests that we are highly constrained in our creativity by the concepts we already have. Concepts of existing things are truth-bound: your concept of an animal, for example, has the proper function of accurately representing the range of things that are in fact animals. When you try to envision a new, fictional kind of animal, you begin with a mental image that exemplifies your existing concept of animal, which is why you are constrained by that concept. You then have to manipulate your initial image, varying its features in ways that abandon the aim of accuracy, using a capacity that isn’t truthbound. Generalizing this point yields the cognitive manipulation thesis , according to which creative thought requires cognitive manipulation, which involves thinking in ways that are not bound to the truth (Stokes 2014: 167). Plausibly, imagination is the mental capacity which is best suited to serve in this cognitive manipulation role. In the studies just cited, subjects must use their imagination to manipulate their existing concepts so as to form new ideas.

Recent empirical research on visual imagery seems to corroborate this claim. Various studies have identified positive correlations between creative problem solving and visual image generation, image transformation, and vividness of imagery (Finke 1990, 1996; Zemore 1995; R. Morrison & Wallace 2001; Pérez-Fabello and Campos 2007). A more recent study highlights the importance of image transformation ability—the ability to mentally manipulate a given image—and the ability to achieve high degrees of visual creativity. Further, the results of this study suggest that although vividness negatively correlates with the practicality of images created, vividness positively correlates with novel idea generation (Palmiero et al. 2015). The novelty involved is minimal, but again it appears that imagination, here in the form of imagery, well serves the role of cognitive manipulation.

Stokes observes further that we can voluntarily control imaginative states (in contrast with other non-truthbound states, like desires and wishes). And because imagination connects in important ways with inferential systems, as well as affective systems, the thoughts it produces can often be integrated with knowledge and skills to formulate an innovative strategy or solution to a problem. Finally, this role for imagination in creativity is not exclusive to the rich creativity of artists and scientists, but indeed seems to characterize the minimally creative behavior that we all enjoy. This claim is partly motivated by the empirical research just discussed. Here, as in the more radical cases, instances of novel achievement or learning by subjects requires more than rote memorization; it requires cognitive manipulation of the information in the relevant conceptual space (e.g., combining concepts about houses and persons). This kind of cognitive activity is best done by using the imagination.

Peter Carruthers has argued that imagination is important to creativity on evolutionary grounds (2002, 2006; see also Picciuto & Carruthers 2014). Like the above analyses, he focuses on the playfulness of imagination. Pretend play typically develops early in childhood in humans. And imagination in adults provides the right mechanisms for generating and exploring ideas (just as required by the Geneplore model). Carruthers argues that imagination evolves under adaptive advantage as a kind of practice for adult creativity—and may have been accordingly selected for, aligning with the putative creativity explosion of 40,000 years ago (Mithen 1996, 1998; Harris 2000). This, he argues, is the most parsimonious explanation of both the emergence and the ubiquity of creativity in the human species. See B. Gaut (2009) for a critique of Carruthers’ analysis.

While we may generate ideas consciously in imagination, we may also do so during a period of unconscious incubation, when we are focused on something else. This point is illustrated by any number of famous stories, though some are probably embellished after years of retelling. Isaac Newton witnessed an apple fall from a tree (on some accounts, falling upon Newton’s head) and thereby found the insight for his laws of gravity. August Kekulé is reported to have discovered the structure of the benzene molecule while daydreaming of a serpent circling upon and seizing its own tail. Henri Poincaré alleged that, while boarding a bus, he enjoyed a needed flash of insight that led to his discovery of non-Euclidian geometry. Richard Feynman, the Nobel prize winning physicist, claimed to find inspiration while sipping soda and doodling at adult clubs. And Einstein reported:

I was sitting in a chair in the patent office at Bern when all of a sudden a thought occurred to me. “If a person falls freely he will not feel his own weight”. I was startled. This simple thought made a deep impression on me. It impelled me toward a theory of gravitation. (Einstein, “Kyoto Lecture”, translated and quoted in Pais 1982: 179)

In each case, someone is suddenly struck with a flash of insight about one thing while engaged with something else entirely. The empirically-minded theorist rejects the notion that such ideas arise ex nihilo or through divine possession. So how are they explained in terms of natural mental phenomena?

Arthur Koestler, partly inspired by the work of Henri Poincaré (1908 [1913]), hypothesized that during creative thought processing, ideas are combined in novel ways, and this combination is performed largely unconsciously , by what Poincaré called the subliminal self (Koestler 1964: 164–5). For Poincaré there are only two ways we might think of the unconscious. One, we might think of the unconscious in Freudian terms, as a self capable of careful and fine discernment and, importantly, distinctions and combinations that the conscious self fails to make. Alternatively (and this is the option favored by both Poincaré and Koestler), we can think of the unconscious as a sub-personal automaton that mechanically runs through various combinations of ideas. Importantly, this unconscious process (or, if one likes, automaton) generates random conceptual associations and ideas. And these can then be further considered, examined, explored, and revised.

In the context of creativity in particular, there is precedent, or at least overlap, in Colin Martindale’s cortical arousal theory. This theory centers around the nature of focuses of attention (Martindale 1977, 1981, 1995, 1999; Martindale & Armstrong 1974; Martindale & Hines 1975). Martindale proposes a multi-stage model of problem solving, which if the right mechanism is possessed, leads to creative thought. In the initial stages, information is gathered, various approaches are taken to the problem, and there is a high level of cortical arousal with a narrow focus of attention. As information increases and the problem remains unsolved, two kinds of responses may occur. The first kind of response is to keep attempting the same solutions to the problem such that the arousal and attention focus stay high and narrow, respectively. Alternatively, some persons experience a decrease in cortical arousal coupled with a wider range of attention focus. Information then enters what Martindale calls primary processing: a kind of subconscious cognition not under the complete control of the agent. It is this kind of processing, and the arousal mechanisms that enable it, that distinguish creative insight or achievement from non-creative ones. The first kind of response typically results in frustration and failure (fixation), while the second often results in creative insight.

Some early studies on these phenomena centered around a familiar observation. Consider the tip-of the-tongue phenomenon, when you know that you know some bit of information (an actor’s name or the title of a song) but, try as you may, you just can’t recall it. It often helps to give up for a moment and allow the memory to surface without effort. Researchers found that the same approach—forgetting about a problem—works well to overcome fixation on ineffective ideas so as to allow the actual solution to pop up. Smith and Blankenship primed two groups of subjects with inappropriate or misleading solutions to problems. They left one group to continue struggling with the same problem, while they distracted the second group with a distinct but cognitively demanding task. The second group thereby overcame fixation and outperformed the first group when returning attention to the original target problem (Smith & Blankenship 1989, 1991; see also Smith, Ward, & Finke 1995).

These behavioral methods can be combined with contemporary understanding of neural plasticity and the effects of cognitive effort and attention. Neuroscientists have long recognized that the human brain is plastic —stable in genetic material but constantly undergoing functional change and development in neural networking in response to external stimuli, with the work of Donald Hebb in the middle of the twentieth century being one important early precedent. As Hebb put it, neural cells that “fire together, wire together”. Cell assemblies thus form as a result of the synchrony and proximity of the firing of individual cells.

[A]ny two cells or systems of cells that are repeatedly active at the same time will tend to become “associated”, so that activity in one facilitates activity in the other. (Hebb 1949 [2002: 70])

And continued attention to a problem, what some have called cerebral effort , causes changes in the networking of the brain’s cortex (Donald 2001: 175–8). Importantly, these changes can continue to take place, to “reverberate” even after one has removed attention from that problem. This motivates a simple (and somewhat unsurprising) hypothesis: attending to and performing cognitive tasks affects neural networking (Posner et al. 1997; Posner & Raichle 1994; see also Kami et al. 1995), and those changes can involve strengthening of synaptic connectivity (which correlate with conceptual connections and associations). These changes, again, can occur both when one is attending to a task and after one has diverted attention elsewhere. And, finally, the latter goes some way to explain a moment of insight after incubation (the so-called incubation effect): when one returns attention to the target problem, new or newly strengthened neural connectivity (as a result of previous cognitive effort) can give rise to a new idea. And because that neural process is not in any sense done by you, the emergence of the new idea can feel like a burst of insight (see Stokes 2007; Thagard & Stewart 2011; Ritter & Dijksterhuis 2014; and Heilman 2016).

There are also various recent studies on closely related topics: on mindwandering and spontaneous thought (Christoff et al. 2016; Irving & Thompson 2018; Murray et al. forthcoming), on so-called “divergent thinking” (Mekern et al. 2019), and more on the neural basis of insight (Jung-Beeman et al. 2004; Bowden et al. 2005; Limb & Braun 2008; Dietrich & Kanso 2010; Kounios & Beeman 2014).

It should be intuitive that creativity often involves solving problems and doing so in interesting or surprising ways. In exceptional cases, the individual identifies a problem solution that perhaps no one (including the creator) anticipated. But there are countless examples of more mundane instances of problem solving, where the solution may be surprising (or especially interesting) to only a few individuals, perhaps even only to the problem solver. One broad, standard experimental method used by researchers thus focuses on insight in problem solving. Some problems (thankfully!) can be solved by straightforward appeal to memory, or by applying some technique or method of calculation in a mechanical way. Solving the problem may still take time and effort, but the solution will come so long as one executes the appropriate strategy or applies the relevant knowledge from memory. An insight problem, by contrast, typically requires something new on the part of the individual, and one must often “change views” of the structure of the very problem. Predictably, there are a variety of definitions or characterizations of “insight” in the literature. Here are two recent, representative examples. Bowden et al. suggest that insight occurs

when a solver breaks free of unwarranted assumptions, or forms novel, task-related connections between existing concepts or skills. (Bowden et al. 2005: 322)

More recently, Kounios and Beeman write,

we define insight as any sudden comprehension, realization, or problem solution that involves a reorganization of the elements of a person’s mental representation of a stimulus, situation, or event to yield a nonobvious or nondominant interpretation. (2014: 74)

There are at least two, separable components of insight thus understood. First, an insight problem requires non-mechanical or non-algorithmic solution, and this in turn requires some kind of conceptual reorganization. A hackneyed phrase may come to mind here: one has to “think outside the box”.

The second element of insight as understood here is subjective or phenomenological. An insightful problem solution is often described as occurring suddenly and with little or no apparent effort. It is an aha moment, even if less dramatic than the traditionally romanticized Eureka moment. One way researchers have tested for this subjective feature is to ask subjects to report nearness or “warmth” relative to solving a problem. They find that for insight problems, by contrast to non-insight problems, subjects report that as they near solution they experience abrupt changes in the sense of warmth for solving the problem (Metcalfe & Wiebe 1987; see also Dominowski 1995; Laukkonen & Tangen 2018). More recently, researchers have begun to employ neuroimaging techniques to study insight and insightful problem solving (Luo & Niki 2003; Mai et al. 2004).

First, researchers have developed methods for using subjective report, where subjects rate whether they felt that they used insight in solving a designated problem (Bowden et al. 2005). And second, and coupled with those report methods, researchers have developed simple problems that can be solved with insight. One such example is the “Compound remote associates problem” (CRA). Here is an example of a CRA problem:

Each of the three words in (a) and (b) below can form a compound word or two-word phrase with the solution word. The solution word can come before or after any of the problem words. french, car, shoe boot, summer, ground [ 1 ] (Bowden et al. 2005: 324)

Because of their simplicity, these problems can be solved unambiguously and quickly, and with this speed comes better potential for neuroimaging study. In instances where subjects report insight solutions to these kinds of problems,

EEG shows a burst of high-frequency (gamma-band) EEG activity over the right temporal lobe, and fMRI shows a corresponding change in blood flow in the medial aspect of the right anterior superior temporal gyrus (Jung-Beeman et al. 2004). (Kounios & Beeman 2014: 78)

The question for neuroscientists is whether this convergence of evidence is sufficient to establish neural correlates of insight.

A moment of “insight” can be misleading, as what initially strikes you as a promising idea may ultimately turn out to be a dead end. You may have countless ideas in the course of undertaking a complex creative project, while only a few of them will make the final cut. A crucial part of your creative work therefore consists in evaluating your ideas. For any idea that occurs to you, you might have to ask: Will this work? Is it new? How does it fit in with other parts of your project? Do you have the resources and abilities to bring it to fruition? Is it worth the time and effort?

Much of the research on this phase of the creative process is concerned to identify and categorize the range of factors that people take into consider as they evaluate their ideas (Blair & Mumford 2007; Dailey & Mumford, 2006). Unsurprisingly, those factors vary from one domain to another. New culinary dishes are judged by factors like aroma, taste, texture, color, presentation (Horng & Lin 2009), whereas improved musical performances are judged according to their complexity, originality, and technical virtuosity (Eisenberg & Thompson 2003), and so on. Your understanding of the relevant factors is part of your internalized model of the domain (Bink & Marsh, 2000; Csikszentmihalyi & Sawyer 1995). And since you acquired and refined that model through years of preparation, your capacity for evaluation is largely a consequence of your efforts from that initial stage.

Somewhat more surprisingly, there is some evidence that people who are good at evaluating ideas are also good at generating them (Runco 1991; Runco & Dow 2004; Runco & Chand 1994; Runco & Vega 1990).

Other studies support what Sawyer calls Sawyer (2012: 131) calls the productivity theory, which says that the best way to get good ideas is to have lots of ideas and just throw away the bad ones. In historiometric studies, Simonton found that creators who yielded the greatest number of works over their lifetimes were mostly likely to produce works that were significant and stood the test of time. Even more striking, he discovered that, from year to year, the periods when creators were most productive were also the ones in which they were most likely to do exceptional work (Simonton 1988a, 1988b). Linus Pauling, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954 as well as the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962, summed up the productivity theory in a famous remark:

If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away. (quoted by Crick 1995 [time 34:57])

The final operation of the creative process—externalizing ideas—may involve any number of disparate activities, which Keith Sawyer sums up as follows:

Creativity research has tended to focus on the early stages of the eight-stage creative process—particularly on the idea-generating stage. But a lot has to happen to make any idea a reality. Successful creators are skilled at executing their ideas, predicting how others might react to them and being prepared to respond, identifying the necessary resources to make them successful, forming plans for implementing the ideas, and improvising to adjust their plans as new information arrives. These activities are important in all creativity, but are likely to be even more important in practical domains such as technological invention and entrepreneurship (Mumford, 2003; Policastro & Gardner, 1999). (Sawyer 2012: 133–4)

It may be tempting to assume that the real creative work is finished once a new idea emerges in the moment of insight, and that externalization is just the uncreative, mechanical chore of making the idea public. But a closer look at the phenomenon reveals that externalization is often integral to creativity itself.

Vera John-Steiner (1985) interviewed, and examined the notebooks of, over 70 exceptional creators (ranging from author Anaïs Nin to composer Aaron Copland), and consulted the notebook of another 50 eminent historical creators such as Leo Tolstoy and Marie Curie. A recurring theme throughout was that at the beginning of each creative endeavor and continually throughout its development, creators manipulate and build upon their impressions, inklings, and tentative hunches using sketches, outlines, and other external representations.

Perkins (1981) corroborated this finding by analyzing the 61 sketches Picasso made en route to painting his famous work, Guernica , as well as Beethoven’s musical drafts and Darwin’s notebooks. In each case, the artist progressed by engaging with external representations.

Other studies found that people discovered and solved more problem when they used sketches during a task (Verstijnen 1997), and that people come up with better ideas for improving inventions when they work with visual diagrams (Mayer 1989).

One reason externalization is so vital to substantial creative work is because of our limited capacity to consciously hold and manipulate information in our minds. It helps to offload ideas and store them in the form of physical symbols and expressions in order to free up space for the mind to examine those ideas at arm’s length while entertaining new ones. Thus research shows that internal strategies like mental visualization can help with relatively simple tasks, but for more complex projects externalization is key (Finke et al. 1992: 60).

We close our survey of the cognitive science of creativity with a brief discussion of some general worries about current work, and some prescriptions for future research.

Some have worried about the validity of the psychometric measures employed in neuroimaging studies. One such concern regards the confidence that we should have that the tests employed are really tracking creative behavior. This is of course a general problem, partly symptomatic of the challenges that come with defining creativity (like other phenomena) and with the special challenges that attach to features such as insight and incubation. But there are particular challenges that come with using neuroimaging technologies such as fMRI scanning to attempt to study naturally occurring phenomena. Use of this technology is almost invariably ecologically invalid—one cannot run an fMRI in the artist’s studio. And because of the cost and sensitivity of these imaging systems, the correlative behavioral tests are often significantly abbreviated. This may impose constraints on space for occurrence of the target phenomena—novel thinking and insight—during the imaging session. As one researcher worries,

Too often single tests are used—or even single items! This is contrary of psychometric theory in general (where longer tests allow errors to cancel themselves out and are thus more reliable) and true of the research on creativity assessment in particular, where differences among items and even tests are common (Richards, 1976; Runco, Mohamad, & Paek, 2016 [sic should be Runco, Abdulla et al. 2016). Results from any one test will not generalize to other tests. Results from a single item of course have even less generalizability. (Runco 2017: 309–310; see also Abraham 2013)

Another empirical researcher criticizes what he sees as “the wild goose chase” in the neuroscience of creativity. Arne Dietrich (2019) recapitulates the above worries about validity of psychometric measures and their abbreviated and piecemeal application. He further worries about the now dominant emphasis on divergent thinking, and the default mode network (as well as the now mostly abandoned emphasis on notions such as madness, the right brain, and REM sleep). Dietrich’s concern in each case is that the research emphasis is unhelpfully myopic, and that while the imaging methods are sound and state of the art, the characterization of creativity is not. He decries the temptation to identify what may be a feature of creativity with the whole of the phenomenon. Divergent thinking, he suggests, is likely a cluster of various mental phenomena rather than a singular one, and

there is no effort underway to dissect divergent thinking and link it to the kinds of cognitive processes we use to operationalize all other psychological phenomena, such as working memory, cognitive control, semantic memory, perceptual processes, or executive attention. (2019: 37)

Notice, then, that the “wild goose” for Dietrich is to hastily conclude and then center studies around a singular, special creativity mechanism.

Dietrich also offers various prescriptions for remedy. To combat myopia, he suggests (as some have in other disciplines, e.g., Boden 2004) a plurality of types of creativity (and/or features of creativity). He cautions,

Since different types of creativity contain opposing brain mechanisms—focused versus defocused attention, for instance—any all-encompassing claim about creativity in the brain will almost certainly qualify as phrenology. (2019: 39)

He pairs this with a prescription for a more interdisciplinary approach to the topic. Others in the field have made the same prescription, advocating a “systems” approach sensitive both to the multi-faceted nature of creativity and the value of theorizing at multiple levels of explanation (Hennessy & Amabile 2010).

These directives for future research seem hard to resist. At the very least, it would seem advantageous to ensure that the full range of empirical method across the behavioral and brain sciences is communicated across the relevant sub-disciplines. This would ideally lead to better collaboration amongst such researchers. What’s interesting is that a cousin to this prescription is not well heeded by the same researchers advancing it here. However little crossover there is between, say, behavioral psychologists and neuroscientists in studies of creativity, there is comparatively even less crossover (almost none) between the psychological sciences and computational approaches to creativity. The next section thus begins by highlighting this “gap”, and identifying some of the potentially fruitful areas for interdisciplinary work on that front. It then continues with a discussion, generally, of research on creativity in the fields of computing science, artificial intelligence, and robotics.

Just as we find in psychology and neuroscience, there is a rich research literature on creativity in artificial intelligence and computer science, with devoted journals, special issues, and conferences ( The Journal of Artificial Creativity , The Journal of Creative Music Systems , Digital Creativity , Minds and Machines special issue on Computational Creativity [Gervás et al. 2010], The International Conference on Computational Creativity ). The question we focus on here is whether a computer could be creative . As background, it is worth considering how theorists approached the analogous question as to whether a computer could think .

Although theorists of various kinds have asked whether machines can think since at least the early modern period, the most important conceptual innovations on the topic came from Alan Turing, centering around his 1950 paper “Computing machinery and intelligence”. Here Turing provided a number of groundbreaking insights. Perhaps most familiar is Turing’s “imitation game”, now commonly known as “the Turing Test”. In brief, the test involved an unknowing interrogator who could ask an open-ended series of questions of both a human and a computer. If the interrogator could not distinguish computer from human, Turing postulated that this would suffice to illustrate genuine intelligence. There is no shortage of controversy regarding the aptness of the test for intelligence, and arguably no computer has yet passed it. (For more thorough discussion of Turing and the Turing test see entries on Alan Turing , Turing machines , and the Turing test ).

Successful performance in Turing’s game would require remarkable behavioral flexibility. And it is highly operational: specify a threshold for imitation, and then simply allow the interrogator to ask questions, then assess performance. If the behavior is sufficiently flexible to fool the interrogator, Turing claimed, the behavior was intelligent and, therefore, the computer intelligent.

With this background in mind, what are some of the cases in AI research lauded as success cases, and how do they align with some of Turing’s criteria?

Many of the familiar success cases are highly specialized. Deep Blue defeated chess master Garry Kasparov (Kasparov & Greengard 2017); some language processing systems managed to navigate social contexts such as ordering from a menu at a restaurant (Schank & Abelson 1977); AlphaGo more recently defeated the world champion Go player. This specialization is both a virtue and a limitation. On the one hand, achievement in such a specialized domain implies an exceptional amount of detailed memory and skill. On the other hand, this knowledge and skill does not generalize. Neither Deep Blue nor Alpha Go could successfully order from a menu, along with countless other basic human tasks. Put in terms of Turing’s imitation game, these systems would fail miserably to fool a human, or even remotely imitate one (except for their performance in a very narrow domain). What about systems such as IBM’s Watson , which famously won (against humans) on the television game show Jeopardy! This performance is more general, since topics on the show vary widely, and seemed to require both language comprehension and some minimal reasoning skills (see entry on artificial intelligence for extended discussion). Even so, Watson’s capabilities are still quite limited: it cannot make fluid conversation “in real time” and is largely insensitive to temporal and other factors that come with context.

There are many, many more examples of computational systems that display sophisticated behavior, from the highly specialized to the more general. On the language processing front, very recent AI systems such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s LaMDA significantly outperform the systems described above. To be clear, these are remarkable achievements that display substantial complexity and, it appears in some cases, significant flexibility—features Turing highlighted in characteristically human behaviors. But this also underscores a distinction, often invoked by critics of artificial intelligence research. There is a difference between a computer’s displaying or merely imitating an intelligent behavior, and a computer’s instantiating intelligence through such behavior. And the critic will say, even if a computer behaves as if it is intelligent, this is just modeling or simulating intelligence. The greater ambition, though, is “genuine artificial intelligence”, a system that actually thinks. John Searle refers to this as the distinction between “weak AI” and “strong AI”, respectively.

• Weak AI : Could a computer behave as if it thinks?
• Strong AI: Could a computer genuinely think?

The general worry here is that however sophisticated a system’s behavior may appear “from the outside”, for all we know it may just be a “hollow shell” (Haugeland 1981 [1997]; Clark 2001). The worry has then been fleshed out in various ways by specifying what is missing from the shell, as it were. Here are three standard such candidates. And, again, in each case however sophisticated the computer’s behavior may appear it still may be lacking in any or all of the following. First, the computer may lack consciousness . Second, the computer may lack any understanding of the symbols over which it computes (Searle 1980). Finally, the computer may operate without caring about its own behavior or, as John Haugeland colorfully puts it, without “giving a damn”. In each case, any kind of response from the ambitious AI researcher encounters the substantial challenges that come with theorizing mental phenomena such as consciousness, understanding, linguistic competence, and emotion. (Turing 1950, for instance, recognized but largely eschewed these kinds of topics).

It’s one thing to ask whether computers could think, and another to ask whether they could be creative. And just as the prospect of artificial intelligence or thinking divides into two questions—of weak AI and strong AI—we may distinguish two analogous questions about artificial creativity, which we’ll refer to as the questions of “weak AC” and “strong AC”, respectively. To begin with the former:

• Weak AC : Could a computer behave as if it’s creative?

Something behaves as if it’s creative if it produces things which are psychologically new (new to that thing) and valuable . Arguably, a number of computers have already done that.

In the 1970s, Harold Cohen began using computational technologies to produce new drawings and paintings. The work of his computer painter, Aaron, has exhibited at galleries such as the Tate and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. David Cope’s “EMI” (Experiments in Musical Intelligence) has composed musical works in the style of various known composers and styles, even a full-length opera. Some of these works have been recorded and produced by bona fide record labels. Just search “Emily Howell” on Spotify or Apple Music and give it a listen (Cope 1996, 2006). Simon Colton’s The Painting Fool is an ongoing project, involving a software that abstracts phrases, images, and other items from newspaper articles and creates collage-style pieces. It has also produced portraits, based on images of film characters, of the same individual in different emotional states (see Painting Fool in Other Internet Resources ; see Colton 2012 for theoretical discussion). Even more recently, there have been explosive developments in generative art systems like DALL•E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, VQGAN+CLIP. (For discussion see Paul & Stokes 2021). In all of these cases, the relevant outputs of the computer program are new relative to its past productions—so they are psychologically (or behaviorally) novel, which again is all the novelty that creativity requires. And although historical novelty isn’t required for creativity, it’s worth noting that these products appear to be to be new in all of history as well.

What about value? As noted above in §2.1 , some theorists reject the value condition, but even if value is required for creativity, that too is a condition these computer artworks seem to meet. Assessments of value can be controversial, but that is no less true for the outputs of human creativity. The fact that these works are critically acclaimed, showcased in prestigious galleries, and commissioned by selective record labels testifies to their artistic merit, and viewers find them pleasing, interesting, and appealing, even before being apprised of their unusual origin. So it is reasonable to conclude computer programs like the ones just described exhibit at least weak AC insofar as they produce works of valuable novelty, and one could cite many more examples in the same vein.

Some theorists have noted that, whether or not the original Turing test is a good test for intelligence or thinking, we might adopt an analogous test for creativity: If a computer can fool human observers into thinking that it is a human creator, then it is in fact creative (Pease & Colton 2011; see also Chen 2020 for useful discussion of artificial creativity, including many additional examples of particular cases, and so-called Dartmouth-based Turing tests). If we employ this test, we might find ourselves with an unexpected conclusion: computers can be creative; in fact, some of them already are. But one might reasonably worry that the test is inadequate and the conclusion is too quick (Berrar & Schuster 2014; Bringsjord et al. 2001). From the fact that a computer operates as if it’s creative, one might argue, it doesn’t follow that it really is. Which brings us to our next question:

• Strong AC : Could a computer genuinely be creative?

This obviously returns us to the question of what conditions something must meet in order to count as being genuinely creative. And here we need go beyond the outwardly observable product-features of novelty and value to consider the underlying processes of genuine creativity. As we saw in §2.2 , theorists have variously proposed that in order for a process to count as creative, it must be surprising, original, spontaneous, and/or agential. There is no consensus to appeal to here, but if any one of these conditions is indeed required for genuine creativity, then a computer could be genuinely creative only to the extent that it executes processes which satisfy that condition.

The classic statement of skepticism regarding the possibility of computer creativity is due to Lady Ada Lovelace who had this to say while remarking on “the Analytical Engine” designed by her friend Charles Babbage:

It is desirable to guard against the possibility of exaggerated ideas that might arise as to the powers of the Analytical Engine. The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. (Lovelace 1843, italics added)

Though Lovelace does not frame her comments in terms of “creativity” as such, she explicitly denied that a computer could satisfy at least one condition that is plausibly required for creativity, namely originality . A computer cannot be the originator, the author, or the creator of anything new, she contends; it can only do what it is programmed to do. We cannot get anything out of a computer that has not already been programmed into it. Further, Lovelace may also be interpreted as expressing or implying doubt about whether a computer could satisfy the three other proposed requirements for genuine creativity. Insofar as a computer’s outputs cannot be original, one might also suspect that they cannot be surprising . The image of a machine strictly following rules invokes precisely the kind of mechanical procedure that is the antithesis of spontaneity . And it may seem that such a machine could not be a genuine agent either. The problem isn’t just that a computer can’t produce anything original; it’s that it deserves no credit for whatever it does produce. Any praise or blame for the outputs of a computer rightly go to the engineers and programmers who made the machine, not to the machine itself. While these points may be intuitive, at least some of them are being challenged by modern technologies, which have come a long way since Babbage’s invention.

Consider AlphaGo again. This is a “deep learning” system, which involves two neural networks: a Policy network and a Value network. Very briefly: The system is trained using a vast number of legitimate moves made in actual games of Go played by professional human players (28.4 million moves from 160,000 games, to be precise; see Silver et al. 2016 and Halina 2021). The network is further trained, again using learning algorithms, by playing many games (some 100 million) against previous versions of itself (in the sense of a differently weighted neural network). The weights of nodes in the network are then adjusted by a learning algorithm that favors moves made in winning games. The value network is trained over a subset of these many games, with node weighting adjustments resulting in reliable probability assignments to moves vis-à-vis their potential to contribute to a win. Finally, the system employs a Monte Carlo search tree (MCT). Generally, this kind of algorithm is designed to simulate a decision process to optimize success given chosen parameters. In this case, the search algorithm selects a given path of moves, then adds some valid moves to this path, and then if this process does not terminate (end in win/loss), the system performs a “rollout”. A rollout essentially plays the game out for both players (using samples of possible moves) to its conclusion. The information that results from the MCT and processing by the value network are then fed back (back propagated) into the system. This entire process (once the system is trained) is rapid and determines how AlphaGo “decides” to move in any given game.

Here are some things to note. AlphaGo’s style of play is surprising . As commentators have noted, it is starkly unconventional relative to standards of human play (Halina cites Baker and Hui 2017 [ Other Internet Resources ]). Indeed, Lee Sodol, the world champion Go player defeated by AlphaGo in 2016, remarked that AlphaGo’s play revealed that much of human play is, contrary to prior common opinion, not creative after all—intimating that at least some of the play of AlphaGo is . Note further that this system is flexible. While there are learning algorithms and rules that adjust network weights, the system is not mechanical or predictable in the same fashion as earlier, classical systems (including Deep Blue , for example). In a recent paper, Marta Halina has made this argument (Halina 2021). She explicitly invokes Boden’s characterization, which requires novelty, value, and surprise of creativity. Again, the novelty and value should be plausibly attributed in this case. Regarding surprise, Halina suggests that it is AlphaGo’s employment of MCT that enables a kind of “insight”, flexibility, and unpredictable results. She writes,

It is the exploration parameter that allows AlphaGo to go beyond its training, encouraging it to simulate moves outside of those recommended by the policy network. As the search tree is constructed, the system starts choosing moves with the highest “action value” to simulate, where the action value indicates how good a move is based on the outcome of rollouts and value-network evaluations. (Halina 2021: 324)

Halina grants that given its domain-specificity, as we have already noted, this system’s particular abilities do not generalize in a way that may be required to properly attribute genuine intelligence. But she suggests that the complex use of the MCT search may amount to “mental scenario building” or, we might say, a kind of imagination. And insofar as this search algorithm technology can be applied to other systems in other domains, and imagination is a general component of intelligence, perhaps here lies space for generalizability. AlphaGo also affords at least some reply to the traditional Lovelace worry.

Artificial systems do not act only according to preprogrammed rules hand-coded by engineers. Moreover, current deep-learning methods are capable of producing systems that are superhuman in their abilities to discover novel and valuable solutions to problems within specific domains. (Halina 2021: 327)

If this is right, then AlphaGo exhibits originality . Finally, the flexibility with which this system operates may also satisfy Kronfeldner’s spontaneity requirement.

Some of these same features are found in a related approach in AI, namely research in evolutionary robotics. These systems also involve various forms of machine learning but in this case the learning is distributed, as it were, across a population of individuals rather than one individual. This approach can be understood, albeit imperfectly, as analogous to natural evolution. One begins, typically in computer simulation, with a population of agents. These agents are typically identified with individual neural networks, the connections and weightings of which are random to start. Relative to some task—for instance, avoiding obstacles, collecting objects, performing photo or phonotaxis—a genetic algorithm assigns a fitness value to each individual agent after a certain period of time or number of trials. Fitter agents are typically favored and used to generate the next population of agents. Also included in this generation are random mutation and genetic crossover (digital breeding!). Although it can take hundreds of generations, this is a discovery approach to engineering or constructing a system that successfully performs a task; it is “gradient descent learning” (Clark 1996). In this bottom-up approach, no single individual, nor even an entire population, are in any strict sense programmed. Rather, successful agents have “learned” as a result of generations of randomness, crossover, and small fitness improvements (and lots and lots of failures). Early success cases evolved robots that can follow trails (Koza 1992), locomote in insect-fashion (Beer & Gallagher 1992), guide themselves visually (Cliff, Husbands, & Harvey 1993), and collect garbage (Nolfi & Floreana 2000). See Bird and Stokes (2006, 2007) and Stokes and Bird (2008) for analysis and study of creativity in the context of evolutionary robotics.

These systems most certainly produce novelty. Later, fit individuals achieve novelty at their aimed task relative to whole generations and populations of previous agents. And this novelty is often surprising to the engineers and programmers that build them, indeed sometimes even unpredictably independent of any relevant task for individuals in the population. There are many examples in the literature. Indeed Lehman and others (2020) catalog a large range of cases where digital evolution surprises its creators, categorizing them in four representative groups: “mis-specified fitness functions”, “unintended debugging”, “exceeded experimenter expectations”, and “convergence with biology”. Here is one now relatively famous example of the first type of case. In early research in artificial life (A-Life), Karl Sims (1994) designed virtual creatures that were supposed to learn to walk (as well as swim and jump) in a simulated environment. The fitness function assessed individual agents on their average ground velocity across 10 seconds. Some of the fittest individuals to evolve were surprising: they grew tall and rigid and when they would fall over they would achieve high ground velocity, thus maximizing fitness given the (mis)specified parameters in unpredicted ways.

This is but one example of how systems like these can evolve in unpredictable or surprising ways. This unpredictability has occurred not just in simulated robotics, but in embodied robotics as well. In using a genetic algorithm to attempt to evolve oscillating sensors, researchers unintentionally evolved a radio antenna (Bird & Layzell 2002). This unexpected result arose from a combination of the particular algorithm used (which was intended) and various physical features of the space such as proximity to a PC monitor (which the researchers had presumably deemed irrelevant but which the evolved system, in a sense, did not). And one might be further inclined to describe some of these achievements as creative (and not just in the trivial sense that they are original instances of robotic success), since they also produce value, at least insofar as they are useful at performing a task, whether it is locomoting or locating a source of light or sensing radio waves.

Some theorists in this domain might argue that these systems achieve spontaneity as well. Given the substantial inclusion of randomness in the system’s development—both at the outset when the individual’s neural networks are randomized and more importantly with random mutation across populations—it is intuitive to describe the system’s as not following a mechanical procedure. Indeed, the way in which systems exploit fitness functions and data patterns further underscores this point. (Again, see the rich catalog of cases offered by Lehman et al. 2020).

On the face of it, then, recent technologies in AI, evolutionary robotics, and artificial life, seem to fulfill many of the conditions proposed for genuine creativity. These systems produce things that are novel and valuable, and do so through computational processes that are plausibly surprising, original, and spontaneous. The one requirement we have yet to address, however, is agency . Recall the suggestion, implicit in Lovelace’s remarks, that whatever a computer produces is to the credit of the programmer, not the computer. Notice that as sophisticated as current technologies in artificial creativity may be, presumably they are still not subject to praise or blame for what they do. If any beings are responsible for the work of these programs, it still seems to be the programmers and engineers who make them, not the programs themselves. The programs themselves do not seem to “give a damn”. So, if the creative process requires agency, arguably we have not yet created, programmed, or evolved a computational system that is really creative, however much they might appear to be. In the pursuit of strong AC, agency might be the final frontier (Paul & Stokes 2021).

It should be clear from the above discussions that there are rich and lively research programs, across a range of scientific disciplines, studying human creativity. These approaches substantiate the view that, contrary to the romantic tradition, creativity can be explained. Psychological functions and neural correlates have been identified, and remarkable advances are being made with computational and robotics technologies. What may be less clear is that, despite these advances, the distinct research programs in question are largely disjoint or siloed.

In a recent paper, Geraint Wiggins and Joydeep Bhattacharya (2014) highlight this “gap” between scientific studies of creativity. Their particular emphasis is on the gaps between research in neuroscience and research in computer science, and they advocate a bridge in the form of a neurocomputational approach. This kind of bridging may be called for even beyond what these authors prescribe, since there are gaps not just between these disciplines, but also between these and behavioral psychology, AI and A-Life research, and philosophical analysis. Creativity is a deeply complex and deeply important phenomenon. Fully understanding it will require us to integrate a variety of theoretical perspectives, and, as this survey reveals, philosophy has a vital role to play in that endeavor.

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Creative Report Writing

There isn’t a right way to write a report, but there are lots of things available to help you make it more accessible, more entertaining and more likely that people will read it right to the very end.

Writing Reports Creatively

You want me to be creative? Report writing is hard enough without this extra pressure!

Read our great tips below for good business report writing, and learn more about our writing courses .

Hey! Remember essay writing in school? There were some weirdos who loved writing essays, but for the majority of students, essay writing was a homework nightmare.

For some of you, effective report writing may be a breeze, not daunting at all. But for a lot of people, those same essay-writing feelings come flooding back:

“Oh my god, I’ve been given a report to write. Now what am I going to do?”

Report Writing Nightmare

Homework nightmare all over again.

Something we’ve noticed with people who hate report writing is that they don’t feel that’s what they were hired to do. They were hired for their expertise, their experience, and their professionalism and didn’t quite take in that creative business writing was going to be part of it all.

See, even if it’s just a tiny part of it all, it can feel really, really BIG, and it’s those exaggerated feelings that can throw people off guard. A lot of people think of creative report writing as an onerous task, which is why creativity hardly gets a look in.

You’re Going To Be Judged

People huff and puff, tear their hair out, cry, leave it to the last minute, try to get someone else to do it for them. Suddenly they’re under the cosh, suddenly they’re going to get ‘graded’.

All those feelings of inadequacy come up: What am I supposed to do? I’m going to be judged. My neck is on the line. I hate writing reports. I didn’t know this was going to be such a big part of the job, etc, etc.

You might be right. That might be what’s going to happen: you may very well be judged, your neck might be on the line. But it’s the overwhelming feelings we’re interested in because they tend to create that blank-page horror: what do I do next?

What Personality?

So this is what people tend to do: they constrain themselves, they lose their unique personality, they become dull, they have to give every piece of information they have and cover all the bases, they shut down and fail to bring their information to life.

OK, maybe it isn’t as dire as all that, but we do see that people tend to rely on their facts, figures, and statistics to tell the story instead of them telling the story and using the facts, figures and statistics to embellish it.

Now, of course, there are some organisations that only want facts and figures. They like the denseness; it makes them feel they’re getting what they paid for. But the reality is that in this day and age, creative report writing has to be more.

Things are changing: an information-packed, fact-packed, dull report usually implies a dull person. Not fair, but there it is.

Bring The Information To Life

See, what report writing is all about is that you’ve taken research and information that you’ve gathered, you’ve assessed it, you’ve brought your expertise to, and then you have to present it to someone else so that they have the information that you have and an understanding of it so that they can then use that information.

What happens, however, is that often people feel they need to ‘park’ their personality and become someone else.

Whereas what you need to be doing, is taking all that information and filtering it through who you are and how you naturally express yourself.

Try This For Some Insight

Here’s an experiment to show what we mean. Pick something you know something about: how much your favourite football team spent on new players this year, how much your council spends on policing, what percentage of your salary goes on mortgage payments/rent/groceries.

Now sit down and write an ‘essay’ about it (it doesn’t have to be a long one!). Read it to yourself. Now find a friend and just tell them about the same subject.

We can pretty much guarantee the two versions won’t be the same. Most people will go into writing mode that’s vastly different from their talking mode.

When relating something to another person you will have a whole collection of skills you use unconsciously that reflects your personality, and your individuality. You’ll enliven your verbal report with anecdotes and the feelings you have about those stories.

The difference is that if you were talking about it, telling someone about it, your voice would be conversational, it would have colour and changes in tone, inflexion, and volume. Your voice would do as much (if not a lot more) to convey your message than the actual words you’d be using.

You’d be using your body, arms, and hands, facial expressions to layer more feelings and expressiveness about your chosen subject.

Writing With Colour

Because the written word is open to interpretation (read, misinterpretation) even more than the spoken word, then it is your job to get the colour, tone, and inflection into your report that would otherwise be missing.

This is what we mean when we say people adopt a report-writing voice. They write with overtly professional, filled with jargon, and complicated, lengthy sentences.

They think that because they are committing themselves to paper and won’t necessarily be around to answer questions and explain something in more detail, they have to present differently than if they were giving the same information face to face.

Give Them Less

That’s what we mean when we say people pack far too much in because they think they need to give the reader everything they know.

They don’t! – You don’t!

It’s like putting on new shoes for an interview that you’ve never worn before. If any of you have ever done that, you’ll know it’s a bad move. No matter how great they looked and felt in the shop, walking in them gives you blisters, takes your attention away from everything else (oh my aching feet!), and makes you wish you had your lovely, old, comfortable, familiar shoes on.

Well, report writing is the same thing. Trying to write in ‘reportese’ is uncomfortable, it takes your attention away from your main message and you wish you could just tell people what you have to say rather than having e to write it.

Reportese vs Conversation

Begin to think of report writing as a conversation. It may feel as though you are doing all the talking but let’s see if we can help you create that voice.

You know how when you’re talking to someone or giving a really fantastic presentation, you can see people nodding in agreement or frowning in disagreement? You’ve hit the target when you can see a non-verbal response. You see how people are reacting.

Well, when you write something you can’t see whether people are nodding in agreement or nodding off to sleep.

Keep Them Awake

YOU HAVE TO KEEP THEM AWAKE, the same way you have to keep people awake during a presentation.

You’re conversing with them but you don’t have their input. What you want is for them to have some kind of reaction: they love it, hate it, agree, disagree, feel comforted, feel panicky, get angry or frustrated. Something is better than apathy, disengagement, and indifference.

Boy, do you know how many dull and turgid reports there are out there that create just that: indifference.

See, it’s even easier for people to get bored and lose their way with the written word. They can allow themselves to get distracted because you’re not there to say, ‘Now read this bit – this is the bit that really tells you what’s going on.’

That’s what you have to be able to do with the written word – give people a really clear road map of what you want them to get from your report. You have to make sure they read ‘this bit’.

People love stories, they do. And for the most part, people love telling stories: they love setting the scene, giving things a big build-up, getting to the punch line, and then finishing up with a ‘tie up all the loose ends’ conclusion.

So tell a story when you’re tasked with creative report writing.

Write With Purpose

OK, maybe we’re going to state the obvious here, but unfortunately, in our experience, it needs to be stated.

You need to know why you’re writing the d**n thing in the first place.

See, we told you it was obvious.

You absolutely must have a message you want people to get. It really isn’t OK just to pile fact upon fact and hope it will make sense to the reader. Part of the purpose of stating your purpose is so you can give the reader a roadmap of your intentions.

If you don’t have a purpose, the reader will give you one you may not want.

Next, have a point of view. Again, if you don’t have one, your readers may well project one onto you.

Some Important Questions

So ask yourself a few questions:

• Who is this report for?
• What do I want it to achieve?
• What do I want to ‘leave’ them with?
• What do they definitely need to know?
• How do I feel about all of this?

Once you’ve answered those questions, you can filter your information through your purpose and your point of view, and this is actually quite a good way to make the material come to life and give it some of your personality.

Lies, Damn Lies And Statistics

Ah, we hear you say. But what about all those statistics?

OK, let’s take statistics.

Here’s a little game. Pick any statistic that you know. Doesn’t matter what it is. Write it down as a ‘cold’ fact. Just the actual statistic. Now do a kind of ‘riff’ on it, embellishing it. Tell a story about it, actually give people some relatively useless information about it but that will pique their interest.

Here’s one that’s a classic in business: In most companies, 80% of their business comes from 20% of their client list. This is the 80/20 rule.

Just The Facts

This is how we could write it if we were just giving you the facts:

• 80% of Impact Factory’s business comes from 20% of our client list
• Our regular clients are A, B, C, D, etc.
• They give us X, Y, Z amount of work each quarter.
• We run marketing campaigns for both our existing client base and potential clients in order to develop the business.

We’ve given you accurate information, but there would be nothing behind it. You wouldn’t actually have the full picture.

Or We Could Try This the Creative Report Writing Way

We have a range of long-term clients including Fidelity Investments, Barnet Council, Merrill Lynch, Lewisham Council, Proximity London, all of which shows the depth and breadth of the kind of people who like our work. We like them in return and enjoy developing our relationships with them.

And this is what we do to ensure a continued interest in what we do: we have unusual marketing campaigns, we give stuff away free, we really listen to the clients’ needs and rectify any mistakes we might make as quickly as we are able, we send interesting email newsletters, we take them to lunch, etc.

80% of our business comes from 20% of our client list. Our clients really love us because we rarely break a promise, we exceed expectations, we communicate with them regularly so they feel connected to us, and they know how much we enjoy working with them.

It’s simply more interesting, and if we then added in the actual figures, they would enhance the story, not be the story. Did you need all that extra information? Probably not. But what it did, was paint a picture of Impact Factory that lets you know how we achieve what we achieve.

Anyone can take a statistic and give it a dry reading; writing it creatively takes something extra. You want people to look forward to reading your stuff.

Who Are You Writing For?

Impact Factory stuff is written by real people for real people. We always have a cartoon on the front page of our documents. It’s a signature (long live The New Yorker magazine!). Our stuff is written colloquially and is filled with stories, anecdotes, analogies and examples.

This means that our work is true to us and our style.

You need to be true to your style rather than producing something that anyone could have written.

For Example

Here’s another story from Robin:

“I once was sitting in the reception of a prospective client and picked up a report that was in a stack for people to read. I realised after five minutes that I hadn’t understood a thing I was reading, and I consider myself very competent when it comes to interpreting statistical material.

One of our clients, Hewitt Bacon & Woodrow, on the other hand, has material that’s clear and really easy to read. On the outside, you might think actuarial information, human resources consultancy – going to be pretty dull.

But their material is written for the customer, rather than for the person writing it.”

Accessible Language

For us, that’s the key. Really good creative report writing is written in language that’s accessible to your readers rather than in your language. Technical reports for the layperson are nearly inscrutable.

The language is dense, and packed with jargon, usually with an assumption that you actually know what they’re talking about. People tend to write from their knowledge rather than from the perspective of the person reading it.

Do you know why there are so many books on the market for computer dimwits? Because most manuals are written for the people who created the programmes, not for the people using them!

The same is often true of reports.

Take care of your audience – coddle them, indulge them, look after them.

Let’s Get Practical

People tell us that one of the hardest things about report writing is getting started. Blank-page syndrome.

One of the problems is that a lot of people think they should be able to just sit down and write something from beginning to end, their thoughts all ordered, the facts and figures tripping off their fingers easily. Ha!

Well, some can. Most can’t.

You may have tried some of these methods, but it’s worth having a go at all of them till you find which one/s help you get more creative.

Forget order. Just throw everything that’s related to your report onto a flip chart or a large piece of paper. OK, OK, a small piece of paper will do. Don’t edit, and don’t try to have the stuff make any sense. Random words will do, phrases, even whole sentences.

Let it be chaotic. Step back. Study it for a while. Then with felt tip pens or coloured pens/pencils, start circling related topics or issues. You can have a great time with arrows, squiggly lines.

Draw (oh no, I can’t draw). No one is ever going to see this stuff. So draw. Stick figures, weird-looking charts and graphs, illustrations. It doesn’t matter. The idea is to start freeing up your creativity, so draw.

Then you can put everything related to each issue or topic together on a separate page. And then you can start with the creative report writing.

Mind Mapping

This is a hugely popular way of ordering information and letting your brain run free at the same time. If you haven’t tried it before. It’s really well worth having a go because it can do wonders for your creativity.

Here’s how it works. Write the topic of your report in the middle of a blank page and draw a circle around it. Then draw lots of lines off from the circle and write along the line anything that pops into your head about that topic. Or you can draw a picture.

Then draw lots of little branches off each of those lines and write (or draw) whatever pops into your mind about each of those subtopics. This can go on for a long time, with branches, sub-branches and more sub-branches.

Free Flowing Ideas

Don’t edit or judge what you’re writing/drawing on each line, if at all possible. You may find yourself repeating yourself under different sub-headings. That’s OK. The idea is to let your ideas free-flow.

At some point, you can stand back and see if you can find any pattern at all in the little off-shoots. Look at the repetitions if there are any.

After that, it really doesn’t matter what format you then use: you can sit down and write up each sub-branch into sentences. You can re-order the information. The important thing is that you’ve accessed your mind in a new way.

Let’s ask google for a few examples

Hi google – Find me some examples of mind maps

Classic Outline Format

Yes, we see nothing wrong with this method either. Anything that works, we say. So, in case you didn’t get this at school, the outline method is:

Report Title

A. Introduction

1. The first piece of information 2. The second piece of information 3. The third piece of information and so on.

B. The first issue to be addressed

1. The first piece of information 2. etc

C. The second issue to be addressed

1. The first piece of information

a. Sub piece of information b. Next sub-piece of information

You get the picture!

Some people really like to work in this format. We, personally, think it might be a little stifling and creativity limiting, but we don’t want to stop people from using it if they find it helps them. We tend to think that’s what you could do after you’ve tried one of the other more fluid techniques.

In other words, once you’ve been a bit anarchic, you can take all your information and order it in outline form.

Technical Aids

One way to overcome the blank-page syndrome is not to write at all (at least at first). Use a Dictaphone to just talk. Much like having a conversation with a friend, use the tape recorder to babble. It most certainly doesn’t need to make sense. Once you replay it and type it up you can have a go at making it make sense.

You don’t even need to have blank-page concerns. Indeed, most of this document was ‘written’ on a Dictaphone. This is a way to let the subject stew away in your brain for a while. If you keep your Dictaphone with you at all times, or if you’re not near a computer, you can at least make a record of your thoughts. Without it, the stew might just bubble away.

Keep the recorder next to your bed as you might wake up in the middle of the night with an idea. Great way to get it ‘off your chest’ if you don’t want to turn on a light to write it down. You might sound like a drunken sailor the next day, but the idea will have been saved.

The next important technical aid is a notebook. Yes, the simple notebook, also kept with you at all times, to jot things down, make notes, and keep tabs on those fabulous ideas that pop up.

30 Second Influencer

A few years ago, we created something called the 30-Second Presentation or 30-Second Influencer. We did this to give our participants a simple model they could use to get information ‘over’ to others in a punchy, enlivening style:

Here it is:

• Get people’s attention
• Make it relevant to them
• Give them your central message
• Use an example they can relate to
• Tell them what you think they should do next/ what the next step should be

The idea is that you write about 60-70 words in total, and if you read it out loud it should take just about 30 seconds. It forces you to get really, really clear using the minimal amount of words.

Here’s an example from Jo Ellen:

I happen to be passionate about recycling and I could go on and on boring you with statistics, who’s doing what where, how everyone should make sure they recycle everything they could. If I go on for too long, I lose my audience. If I give too little, you won’t care.

By starting a report on recycling, using the 30-second influencer, I can lead people into my story before they know it.

Here’s how it could work:

Rubbish! Like me, I bet you use tons of it every week. We could all benefit from recycling more of our rubbish. For instance, in Bury St Edmunds where I live, we have one of the best recycling records in England. Next time you unwrap a package, fold up your newspaper, finish a bottle, think before you toss it into landfill and bin it where it will do some good.

Hopefully, I will have got your attention, whether you agree with me or not. By opening a report on recycling with my 30-second presentation, I’ve given you a precis of my entire report in 5 sentences. Then, it would be my job to enliven those 5 sentences even more with the rest of the report. I might even break down the issues in more detail, and start every section with the 30-second influencer.

What its purpose is, is to get you to distil down everything you want to say in a concise, yet vibrant way.

The Red Editing Pencil

Most people write waaay too much, as we mentioned earlier. They feel they have to stuff their reports with every piece of information they have.

You don’t. So you need to get ruthless, heartless, and pragmatic and start slashing your report. It isn’t as hard as it looks and the advice on the next page might help you see what needs to go.

Looking Good

Looks help.

It’s not just about the information, it’s about the way you present that information.

Long paragraphs don’t work. Give the eye a break! Most people, when they look at a page with very little white space, will already assume it’s going to be boring.

Short punchy paragraphs are better than long technical ones.

Lay things out; be careful of ‘orphans’ and ‘widows’, those single words on a line, or a heading that’s on the bottom of a page with the information on the next page.

If appropriate, use pictures, graphs, and charts to illustrate a point, and then talk people through them. This is a great opportunity to use stories because the facts/statistics will be there in graph/chart form. People can ‘see’ what you’re saying, so you can use your text to bring the facts to life.

And Finally

What a relief. You’ve finished.

Wait! Before you press the print or send button, one last thing to do.

Read it out loud. More than once.

Then, if you have the courage, read it to a friend or colleague. It should flow easily; you should be able to spot mistakes the eye couldn’t see, but your ear can hear. We’d be surprised if after reading it out loud you didn’t want to change a few things, even if they’re minor.

Reading it out loud allows you to put some expression into it – if you find that your words aren’t mirroring that expressiveness, get that red pencil out and start editing like mad!

And Finally Finally

The most important thing to remember about creative report writing is that there is information sitting in your brain that you need to present in such a way so that other people want it to sit in theirs.

When someone finishes reading what you have written they need to have the information you want them to have and the understanding for it to make sense; they know what it is that has to happen next;

It doesn’t matter what the report is about, who it’s for, or what it’s going to be used for if you can keep to that one objective – the transfer of useful information from you to others – then your reports should get easier and a whole lot more creative.

Write Like A Presenter

Do you know that piece of advice that people give to presenters? Tell your audience what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you’ve just told them.

Powerful copywriting is like that too.

You set out your stall, putting it in digestible chunks, perhaps using the 30 Second Influencer. The bulk of your report is what you want/need the readers to know, and then you pack up your stall, summarising the key points.

And like any good verbal presentation, make sure your last couple of paragraphs are the ones they’re going to remember.

There isn’t a right way to write a report, but there are lots of things available to help you make it more accessible, more entertaining, and more likely that people will read it right to the very end.

You will also benefit from understanding the barriers to communication that can impact the way you write as much as the way you speak .

Check out the Harvard Business Review report into How Bad Writing is Destroying Your Companies Productivity

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British Council Creative Economy

State of creativity report.

The State of Creativity report was orginally published by the  Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre in April, 2023.

This report includes contributions from 24 creative industry thinkers from seven universities and includes interviews with creative industry CEOs and practitioners. 

Through our Creative Economy programme we’ve supported its translation into eight additional languages: Arabic, French, Indonesian, Mandarin, Spanish, Portuguese, Uzbek and Ukrainian, to enable further international collaboration.

Translations can be accessed here:

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Study Today

Largest Compilation of Structured Essays and Exams

Essay on Creativity

December 6, 2017 by Study Mentor Leave a Comment

Table of Contents

Concept of Creativity

The whole world is ruled by creative ideas. Creativity allows a man to think beyond the thinkable and lets him into a world of creative ideas. When we see a small lump of clay lying on the table, we may not do much with it. But when a small child encounters it on the table, he is bound to pick it up, give it some form according to his creative ideas, bring life to it and transform it into some other form. So what is the job of creativity here.

Creativity is that tool which can convert or give a new dimension or transform a certain thing into one or many other forms based on the imaginative capacity of the creator. So how exactly is creativity measured in a person comes up the next question.

Creativity is un measurable. It is not a tangible resource. It is a complex intangible mixture of imaginative thinking space combined with idea that blend and fuse to come out from the creator’s mind guiding him to perform actions based on the creative thought process that just arose in his mind.

Creativity brings new life to a still resource, it has the power to display something beautifully, and it has the ability to make new things out of nothing.

Imaginative Space

A person’s imaginative space is where the birth of creative ideas takes place. Suppose we provide a plain paper to a class of students and ask them to fill it up with their own creative ideas. After a while when the papers glanced through, one may find ideas thrown on the paper based on every student’s ability and creative thought processes.

One student may find it exciting to draw a cartoon, another one may find his creative talent in drawing a landscape, and another one may like to fill in with a rainbow of colors and so on. So why exactly does the creativity of one person differ from that of another one.

That is simply because no two persons can think and act alike. If we provided mangoes to two persons and asked them to prepare mango juice out of it, both of them are going to turn out differently. Probably the essence of the mango juice may taste similar.

But when it comes to adding the sugar and water, there will be minute differences, if not for very big differences and the taste would look somewhat similar  and also dissimilar in some aspects. That makes the point clear that no two things can have the same creative bent of mind.

Ideas in Play

So how exactly does the creativity of a person come into play. Suppose we see a paper lying in front of us. A layman just idling on his couch doing nothing may probably start playing around with the paper and probably fold the paper into a square shape. A small child who looks at his being done, may like to add to the paper form by putting in his creative instincts.

He probably would want to try making a boat or a kite out of it. An even more creative person may want to try making a paper flower or something more creative out of the same paper. So there are two aspects in this understanding. One is the factor of age. A small toddler of 4 or 5 years may not be able to transform the piece of paper into something very unusual.

His age acts as a determining factor. Whatever creativity he displays is going to be age appropriate and when he starts thinking out of his creative box that becomes his talent. The second factor is the imaginative capacity of a person built on one’s thinking capacity.

An average person would probably convert the piece of paper into a boat or a house or a gun and his approach is determined by how far he is allowing his mind to stretch. He may have tried doing the boat or the house multiple numbers of times and the next time he is going to pick up that paper, he is bound to be trying the same thing again.

His mind is programmed in such a fashion so as to perform the same task over and over again. There is redundancy of his creativity here, but also loss of new creative ideas from within.

If the same person performed a different activity out of the same paper, like probably trying to make a paper flower this time, that which he hasn’t tried before and has to apply his mind to actually give it some form, his creativity now comes to play.

Creative Ideas

Creative ideas do not guarantee pre determined end results. If we are interested in painting a pot with oil colors and sit down to perform the task, we have an initial idea of what is to be done. OR assuming we have a picture that is to be depicted on the pot, we start with our strokes on the pot.

When we begin, we are unsure how the strokes are going to proceed. It is a combination of our imagination with our ideas to better that imagination that results in a creative end product.

When we begin with a vague idea of how the pot is to be painted, we have a certain picture of the depiction in our mind, how it would look on the pot when it’s done and how the spread of colors would be, etc. But the idea in our mind may certainly not match with the final depiction on the pot.

This is due to the fact that the actual depiction on the pot depends on the application of the creative ideas that flew in our minds. What lay as a pool of creative ideas in our mind got some definite form when it came on the pot and so the creativity of the person is thus exhibited.

Creativity of one person differs from another person. The way one person thinks would definitely be different from that of another person. Children  are known to be very creative at a very young age. Their creative instincts and skills should be encouraged so that they improve their thinking abilities.

Experienced elders usually advise new generation parents to never stop their children from doing things in a different manner. That is because, the maximum of creative abilities bud and spring when children are young. The way children think and the way in which elders think about the same matter could be found to be entirely different and varying.

Elders seem to add their past experiences, their worldly knowledge before applying their creative minds. Children are different. They don’t have worldly experiences to support in the background. They think in  a very open manner. They do not have wisdom of what would be wrong or what would seem right.

All they know to directly apply the idea that arises in their mind, transform it according to the flow of the idea and give it a final form based on the final creative idea.

Creativity in Daily Lives

Men and women lead lives in their own creative ways. Creativity is something that comes into play in all our lives, knowingly or unknowingly. We use our creativeness daily in some form or the other. Probably when a mother is preparing a curry in the kitchen and thinks of improvising to make the taste better, she is using her creative instincts in the process.

She is making use of her experiences in cooking, applying her creativity to try out something new and the end product results in a creative end product. A change is certainly brought about in our daily lives by application of creativity to it.

There are people who are talented in multi domains and areas and that is purely because they were able to think differently, they were able to think in a manner that nobody else could and that resulted in something much more creative than the previous one.

The application of one’s creative abilities combined with creative thinking makes a difference in one’s work. That work, when delivered at the right place and at the right time, takes the name of talent. Talent may go unnoticed, but creativity does  not require any platform to get noticed.

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26 Best Report Writing Topics For Students

Stumped while brainstorming report writing topics ? We’ve got your back. Take a look at our list of interesting-to-research report topics for students .

Completing a research report for a high school or college English class can be a great way to show off your smarts or interest in a topic, but figuring out where to start can be challenging. Choosing a topic that interests you is an essential part of getting started. The more curious you are about your chosen topic, the more interested you’ll be in the research process.

Choose from our list of sample essay topics below to show off your writing skills — we have options that work for several types of report writing formats. If you’re still stuck picking your next essay topic, check out our round-up of essay topics about education .

1. Technology’s Effect on Society

2. gun control in america, 3. anxiety and social media, 4. present-day slavery, 5. should assisted suicide be legal, 6. the draft’s history in america, 7. no child left behind: did it work, 8. the bp oil spill: 12 years later, 9. parental leave around the world, 10. the insanity plea, 12. trans rights: at what age should a person be legally allowed to transition, 13. should school uniforms be mandatory, 14. compare the uk and us education systems, 15. discuss the pros and cons of violent tv shows for teens, 16. analyze how peer pressure impacts teenagers, 17. does music have healing powers, 18. analyze the causes of wildfires, 19. discuss the impact of global warming on the environment, 20. how does single parenting impact the upbringing of a child, 21. what are the social impacts of the covid-19 pandemic, 22. the effects of urbanization on wildlife, 23. mental health impact of social media on teens, 24. sustainable farming practices and food security, 25. the rise of e-learning, 26. impact of plastic waste on marine life.

Technology makes our lives easier in many ways, but today’s tech-heavy society can also have detrimental effects. Some people find they must always be reachable due to constant access through email and cell phones, while others appreciate instant access to the people closest to them.

In a research report on how technology affects today’s society, you can focus on both sides, touching on how technology makes life easier and affects relationships and work-life balance. Discuss how technology has positively affected medical care and how the overuse of technology has contributed to health issues (including an increasingly sedentary lifestyle). Be sure to back up your points with background information based on research.

Gun control in the United States is a controversial topic. This type of academic report can either be written as a report that presents both sides of a story or as a persuasive report that argues one side. People who are for gun control argue that access to guns increases the risk of violence in the United States. In contrast, people against gun control argue that guns aren’t responsible for deaths and violence.

While presenting this topic in a formal report, discuss the history of gun control in the United States. You may also want to consider comparing gun violence rates in the United States with gun violence in other countries and comparing gun control laws in the U.S. to gun control laws in other countries. Be sure to check your sources carefully when writing about gun control, and choose unbiased sources as often as possible.

It’s tough to avoid social media in today’s day and age. While many people find social media a valuable tool for keeping in touch with family and friends, others find apps like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok to induce stress.  Research shows that using social media can have an addictive effect, as scrolling through a social media app affects the brain’s levels of dopamine, a feel-good chemical.

The high associated with scrolling social media can become addictive. People may find themselves stuck in the downward spiral of scrolling for a dopamine hit, followed by comparing themselves to others, negatively affecting their self-esteem. In a paper on this topic, explore how cutting down on social media can relieve adolescent anxiety and explain how social media can also be used to boost self-esteem positively.

While many think of slavery as a thing of the past, the concept is still sadly alive today. This can be an emotional and tough topic to research and write about. Still, it can educate your readers about the harsh reality of present-day slavery, bringing attention to an issue that often goes ignored.

According to antislavery.org , nearly 50 million people live in modern-day slavery, and approximately 25% of modern-day enslaved people are children. There are many forms of modern-day slavery, including forced marriage, domestic servitude, forced labor, human trafficking, and descent-based slavery (when enslaved children are also forced to work as enslaved people). For your research report on present-day slavery, you may focus on one of these areas or explore the concept of modern-day slavery as a whole.

Many people who have experienced the death of a loved one have struggled to watch them suffer and have wished that there was something they could do to help them end their suffering. In some states in America, assisted suicide has become legal . This means that a person who is terminally ill can work with their medical treatment team to develop a plan to die on their own terms.

Some people are against assisted suicide and believe people should be unable to choose how and when they’ll die. In contrast, others feel that allowing people to choose their time of death following a diagnosis of a terminal illness allows them to pass away with dignity.

This report writing topic for students can work as an informational or persuasive essay. If you have strong feelings on the topic, be sure to present both sides of the argument and your personal opinion on your point of view. You’ll also want to be sure to touch on the history of assisted suicide in the United States and views on assisted suicide around the world, as the practice is common in many areas of the world.

The draft in the United States dictates that any male over the age of 18 can be called to military service in times of war. While some people believe that the draft is outdated and should be left behind , others believe that the draft still has a place in America.

This topic can work either as a research report or a persuasive essay. If you can, talking with a military veteran who began their service due to the draft can help bring realism to your report. You may also want to talk with people who left the country to avoid the draft.

While the draft currently can only bring men to military service, some people believe that women should also be able to be drafted. Discussing this aspect of the history of the draft in the United States can add an exciting aspect to your report.

No Child Left Behind was enacted by President George W. Bush and was in effect from 2002-2015. The law rewarded teachers and schools for having high-performing classrooms and penalized schools that did not perform up to par. While some people felt that the law was the right thing to keep schools accountable for student progress, others felt that it kept disadvantaged students at a disadvantage instead of providing teachers and schools with the support they needed to achieve.

While some schools rose to the challenges of No Child Left Behind, others struggled. In an essay on the topic, you’ll need to form your own opinion on whether NCLB was an effective law for education in the United States. You may want to interview educators and administrators working in schools during the No Child Left Behind era to get firsthand opinions on whether the laws were adequate.

Also known as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill , the BP oil spill occurred on April 20, 2021, and spilled more than 130 million gallons off the Gulf of Mexico near the New Othe Orleans, Louisiana coast. The effects of the BP oil spill are still being felt in the area more than a decade later.

You can go in several different directions while reporting on the effects of the BP oil spill. The animal and plant life in the area is still suffering from the spill’s effects. People in the area are also struggling, especially those who made a living fishing off the coast. Tourism in the area has also been affected, leaving many people in New Orleans struggling to make ends meet.

The length of your research paper will determine how in-depth you can go with the topic. If you’re writing a shorter research paper, it’s wise to choose one of the topics (how the spill has affected the area’s economy, wildlife, tourism, etc.). If you’re writing a longer research paper, split it into subheadings so you can fully delve into each facet of the topic.

Many parents in the United States struggle to make ends meet following the birth of a child due to the short time that companies are required to give parents after they welcome a baby into their home. While the United Nations recommends that mothers have at least four months to recover after giving birth, the United States has no federal requirement for parental leave .

While researching this issue, it’s key to explain the differences between how new parents are treated in the United States compared to other countries and how this treatment affects both the stress levels and job performance of new parents. You’ll want to be sure to look at both sides of the issue, also explaining how the lack of a federally mandated parental leave policy can affect companies.

In the United States, a person can be found not guilty of a crime because of insanity. This means that the person accused of a crime isn’t found innocent—the court has decided that they could not understand the severity of the crime. Some people argue that people should not be able to plead insanity after committing a crime, as the crime occurred whether they understood their actions or not. Others argue that the insanity defense is necessary to protect people who do not understand the consequences of their actions.

When writing a research paper on the insanity defense, it’s key to include examples from real-life legal cases, such as the Steven Steinberg case (1981) . Mr. Steinberg claimed he was sleepwalking and dreaming about a break-in to his home when he stabbed and killed his wife. Steinberg was found not guilty due to temporary insanity, as the jury decided he was not in his right mind when the crime occurred.

Transgender health has received a lot of attention in the news recently, and one of the most commonly debated topics in the transgender health medical community is at what age it makes sense for people who are transgender to begin taking hormones and undergo surgical procedures that allow their body to be in alignment with their gender identification.

According to AP News , “The World Professional Association for Transgender Health said hormones could be started at age 14, two years earlier than the group’s previous advice, and some surgeries are done at age 15 or 17, a year or so earlier than previous guidance.”

Digging into the current research on transgender health and gender dysphoria can help you determine your position on this issue. Be sure that the news sources you use are current, as research in this area constantly evolves. You’ll want to be sure you’re basing your opinion on the most up-to-date information from the medical community.

In most US schools, school uniforms aren’t mandatory; instead, the school enforces a dress code. Dress codes define the clothing the school board finds acceptable for students. The dress code can vary from school to school, but for the most part, it requires students to wear appropriate clothing that is not overly short, formal, or dressy. Some argue that allowing students to choose their clothing for school promotes individuality and confidence.

In other countries in the world, a school uniform is mandatory. The purpose of a school uniform is to eliminate any class issues where some children may be able to afford more fashionable clothes than others. A uniform ensures all students look the same and can be argued to promote a feeling of self-confidence and a sense of belonging amongst the students, removing the pressure on deciding what to wear and meeting peer expectations regarding fashion. Choose a side and argue your case in your report, citing sources and studies.

The education systems in the US and the UK have pros and cons. Some argue that the US approach allows for confidence building through more extracurricular activities, while others argue that the UK prioritizes subjects like Math and English from a younger age.

Study the differences in both education systems and choose which one you think is most beneficial to children. Does one education system set students up for success more than the other? Answer this in your own words to create an engaging argument.

Violent TV shows can have positive and negative impacts on teens worldwide. This report discusses the pros and cons of violent TV shows. Some pros include reinforcing morals and prior beliefs that violence is wrong and has negative consequences. However, some argue that violent TV shows can justify violence in the viewer’s mind.

In your report, analyze both sides of this argument and conclude by discussing your views. Include studies and data to support your arguments, looking at how violence can be perceived.

Peer pressure is one of the biggest challenges that teens face. Peer pressure can be severe, such as peer pressure to drink alcohol underage. However, it can also show up in milder ways, such as pressure to dress a certain way, listen to specific music, or follow the crowd.

In your report, discuss the impact of peer pressure on teenagers’ self-esteem and examine how individuality can be challenging to achieve. Discuss factors contributing to peer pressure, like social media, bullying, etc.

Music is argued to be a healing power for mental health, and physical conditions and can even help plants grow. Study this theory and use research data to determine whether this is true. In your report, describe how music can be healing, but also look at the limitations. To create a compelling report, source real data on how music has been used to heal a health condition and discuss how much it can help.

Wildfires are becoming increasingly common all around the world. In particular, the US sees a high number of wildfires every year. In August 2002, devastating wildfires across California left many people without homes.

This report, discusses the causes and effects of wildfires across the globe. Use this report as an opportunity to bring attention to the noticeable effects of global warming and include ways in which governments can work to reduce wildfires.

Global warming is becoming increasingly common, making it an essential topic for argumentative and analytical reports. In your report, discuss the climate changes and how they have impacted the environment.

For example, examine the glaciers and ice sheets shrinking, wildfires across the globe, and the overall temperature increase in countries worldwide. Use scientific data to back up your report, keeping it factual and informative.

Parenting is a common topic for research reports, examining how upbringing and circumstance can help or hinder a child’s development and well-being. Study the effects of living in a single-parent household versus a joint-parent household on the well-being and success of children. There are many arguments both for and against single parenting.

Some pros include that the child creates an excellent bond with the parent or the absent parent could negatively affect the child, so they shouldn’t be within the household. However, some cons can include the single parent becoming dependent on childcare. Discuss the effects of single parenting and look at both the positive and negative effects.

The Covid-19 pandemic has changed the world; with it, social issues have come into focus. Some of the most impactful social challenges of the pandemic are the increasing rates of anxiety and depression . In your report, research and identify the main social challenges that we have faced since the pandemic and discuss the steps that can be taken to recover. Use this report to discuss your own experiences and the challenges others have faced.

Explanation : Urbanization refers to the growth in population concentration in urban areas and its subsequent effects on the environment, economy, and society. One critical effect is on local wildlife, which can be displaced or endangered due to urban sprawl. Start by researching the local species affected by urban development in your region. They should gather data on species decline, habitat loss, or conservation efforts.

Consider visiting a local wildlife reserve or sanctuary. Interviewing experts or conservationists can provide firsthand insights works too.

The ubiquitous use of social media has led to various mental health concerns among teenagers, including issues related to self-esteem, peer pressure, and isolation. Analyze various scholarly articles and surveys highlighting the psychological effects of prolonged social media use. Contrast this with the potential positive aspects, like connectivity and information dissemination. Survey your school or community to gather primary data on the topic, this can make the report more relevant and localized.

Sustainable farming is a method of farming that incorporates practices that can sustain the farmer, resources, and the community at large. It often interlinks with food security, ensuring everyone can access sufficient, safe, nutritious food. Examine different sustainable farming methods, their benefits, and how they contribute to food security. Highlight challenges and propose potential solutions.

If possible, visit a local farm that employs sustainable practices. Real-world observations can add depth to your report.

E-learning refers to using electronic technologies to access educational content outside of a traditional classroom. With the rise of digital platforms and tools, e-learning has become more prevalent. Assess the advantages of e-learning, such as flexibility and accessibility, against its challenges, like lack of face-to-face interaction and potential distractions. Interview students or educators with firsthand experience with traditional and e-learning settings to provide a balanced view.

Plastic waste often ends up in our oceans, affecting marine life. From microscopic plankton to gigantic whales, marine organisms ingest or get entangled in plastic debris, leading to fatal consequences. Research the plastic journey from land to sea, the species most affected, and the overall ecological repercussions. Investigate potential solutions and conservation efforts.

Incorporate visuals, like photographs or infographics, to show the severity of ocean plastic pollution.

Looking for more advice about report writing topics? Check out our guide on how to write an argumentative essay .

Meet Rachael, the editor at Become a Writer Today. With years of experience in the field, she is passionate about language and dedicated to producing high-quality content that engages and informs readers. When she's not editing or writing, you can find her exploring the great outdoors, finding inspiration for her next project.

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Texans Should Prepare For Hotter Temperatures, Greater Risk Of Fire And Flooding

Weather conditions across the Lone Star State are getting more extreme and more dangerous by the year, according to a new report from Texas A&M University professor and State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon.

The newly updated assessment of extreme weather in Texas draws on data from 1900-2023 to predict trends through the year 2036, and shows a significant uptick in extreme temperatures and droughts, wildfire conditions and urban flooding risks, among other changes. The report was authored by Nielsen-Gammon, a Regents Professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences , in collaboration with the nonprofit public policy organization Texas 2036 .

“We have national climate assessments, but they can’t do justice to Texas’ specific climate conditions,” Nielsen-Gammon said. “With this Texas-specific study, we focused on observed trends as much as possible rather than emphasizing climate model projections. The historic climate trends are part of our lived experience in Texas, and our report puts them in long-term context.”

In recent years, Texans have come face-to-face with the realities of a warming climate, sweating through record-breaking heat waves and lengthy droughts that have taken a toll on agricultural and water resources in many parts of the state.

“During the past couple of years, we’ve gone through two of the hottest summers on record,” Nielsen-Gammon said. “That has altered the trend of 100-degree days, making the increase even more dramatic than it had been. We’ve also seen new research that indicates that surface water supplies might be becoming less reliable, with increasing evaporative losses coupled with increasingly erratic rainfall.”

According to the report, those trends are expected to continue and intensify, with Texans in 2036 experiencing quadruple the number of 100-degree days compared to the 1970s and 1980s. The report also predicts a 7% increase in water lost through summertime evaporation by 2036.

All that hot, dry weather also makes the state more susceptible to wildfires, like the ones that broke out in the Texas Panhandle in February. As the report notes, the number of days with highly favorable conditions for fires to spread has already been increasing, most notably in West Texas.

Meanwhile, an uptick in statewide extreme precipitation — expected to rise 10% in intensity by 2036 compared to 2001-2020 — will likely hit the state’s eastern regions and urban centers the hardest. Parts of East Texas have already seen an increase in precipitation of 15% or more over the last century, the report notes, while a similar increase in extreme one-day precipitation has raised the risk of dangerous flooding in urban areas.

Along the Gulf Coast, rising sea levels and subsidence, or sinking of land, will increase the severity of storm surges from hurricanes, which may themselves be growing more intense due to climate change and related factors.

“Historically, the most costly natural disasters in Texas have been droughts and hurricanes,” Nielsen-Gammon said. “Hurricanes are sudden, catastrophic events, while droughts develop slowly but can affect all sectors of society. Both droughts and hurricanes are changing in complicated ways, but overall the risk from both are growing.”

Understanding these changes, as well as the distinct dangers presented by different types of natural hazards, will be crucial for communities throughout the state, Nielsen-Gammon said — from new agricultural practices in rural areas to flood control measures in cities.

“Solutions cost money,” Nielsen-Gammon said. “Drought-resilient crops tend to produce lower yields, for example. Cities can avoid new construction in flood-prone areas, but existing infrastructure is challenging to retrofit.

“A changing Texas climate presents many challenges,” he continued, “but our ability to monitor and predict those climate changes makes it easier to deal with them.”

For more information on extreme weather trends in Texas, read the full report or see the 2024 update summary published by Texas 2036.

Media contact: [email protected]

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• ‘It’s Important to Be Very Sober’: Cartier’s Creative Director on What Shapes the House’s Designs

We sat down with Marie-Laure Cérède to find out how she does it all.

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Where did you find the inspiration for the Animal Jewelry Watch? Was it inspired by something from the archives? What animal is it? There is a mix of things. First, we wanted to make a chimera, an illusory creature that, instead of being easily defined, had the features of two or more sets of animals. The idea was to emphasize the imagery of the creature – you don’t know if it’s a zebra, a tiger, or even a crocodile, especially on the green (tsavorite garnet) version. And I like this because I think it’s less immediate. It’s a more inspirational image in the bestiary of Cartier. This was important to me, to open a new door. Sculpting shapes inspired animals is very interesting for us. So, that was the first idea. The second idea was that we were inspired by the Cartier Pebble , one of our beautiful shaped cases [first made by Cartier London in 1972, and produced only in very limited editions since then]. The idea was really to sculpt the case shape with the pattern of the animal. So, it’s more a chimera of animal inspirations than of animal figurations. It’s reminiscent of Cartier’s crocodile-themed jewelry and the watch inspired by that motif, the La Doña. Yeah. Certainly, you’re right. There’s a little bit of that in it. It’s the same spirit. Very sculptural.

How is the design process different when reinventing an icon, such as this year’s Tortue? Do you work closely with product marketing and other departments. Is it more restrictive? Marie-Laure:I don’t like to speak about restrictions, but of opportunities. I think we have a unique position in the watchmaking industry, which can be very helpful for creation. We are more a jeweler than a watchmaker, first a jeweler. So, even for the Tortue Chrono Monopoussoir, we knew that when we launched it, it had to be different. We had to add something. And this is why we redesigned not only the case, but also the movement. Before, it was a round movement into the Tortue case. So, this is where the restriction means also more creativity and more opportunity to reinvent something. We also made it slimmer than the last one we had in our current collection. But when you come back to the 1929 original piece, it was also very slim. What we see here is technicalities obeying the design. We decided to remain a small, relatively small size because it’s Tortue.

How does the design process work? Do you draw something first and then find out if it’s possible to make it? The process is always the same, we start by hand because the emotion is thanks to the hand, not to the computer for sure. We are making different renderings by hand. And then when you have a … I won’t come into the process of validation because I think it’s quite confidential. But what I can tell you is that when you have a good product, beautiful design, beautiful drawing, it’s always validated, even if it is very risky, very audacious, very surprising. I don’t know how everybody’s so aware of the Cartier signature, which is impossible to define. The best I can do is say that when people look at the product, they say, “Cartier is the only one to be able to do this.”

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The Cass review of gender identity services marks a return to reason and evidence – it must be defended

Its author has had to fend off criticism and misinformation, but the report offers hope for a realistic conversation

A s the dust settles around Hilary Cass’s report – the most extensive and thoroughgoing evidence-based review of treatment for children experiencing gender distress ever undertaken – it is clear her findings support the grave concerns I and many others have raised. Central here was the lack of an evidential base of good quality that could back claims for the effectiveness of young people being prescribed puberty blockers or proceeding on a medical pathway to transition. I and many other clinicians were concerned about the risks of long-term damaging consequences of early medical intervention. Cass has already had to speak out against misinformation being spread about her review, and a Labour MP has admitted she “may have misled” Parliament when referring to it. The review should be defended from misrepresentation.

The policy of “affirmation” – that is, speedily agreeing with a child that they are of the wrong gender – was an inappropriate clinical stance brought about by influential activist groups and some senior gender identity development service (Gids) staff, resulting in a distortion of the clinical domain. Studies indicate that a majority of children in the absence of medical intervention will desist – that is, change their minds.

The many complex problems that affect these young people were left unaddressed once they were viewed simplistically through the prism of gender. Cass helpfully calls this “diagnostic overshadowing”. Thus children suffered thrice over: through not having all their problems properly addressed; by being put on a pathway for which there is not adequate evidence and for which there is considerable risk of harm; and lastly because children not unreasonably believed that all their problems would disappear once they transitioned. It is, I think, not possible for a child in acute states of torment to be able to think through consequences of a future medical transition. Children struggle to even imagine themselves in an adult sexual body.

Some claim that low numbers of puberty blockers were prescribed. Cass quotes figures showing around 30% of Gids patients in England discharged between April 2018 and 31 December 2022 were referred to the endocrinology service, of whom around 80% were prescribed puberty blockers; the proportion was higher for older children. But these numbers are likely to be an underestimate, as 70% of children were transferred to adult services once they were 17, and their data lost, as very regrettably they were not followed up. This is one of the most serious governance problems of Gids – also specifically addressed by the judges in Keira Bell v Tavistock . Six adult gender clinics refused to cooperate and provide data to Cass. However, having come under considerable pressure, they have now relented .

It is often claimed that puberty blockers were not experimental, as there is a long history of their use. They had been used in precocious puberty (for example where a child, sometimes because of a pituitary abnormality, develops secondary sexual characteristics before the age of eight) and in the treatment of prostate cancer. But they had not been prescribed by Gids to children experiencing gender dysphoria before 2011 . The lack of long-term evidence underlies the decision of the NHS to put an end to their routine prescription for children as a treatment for gender dysphoria – that is, for those whose bodies were physically healthy.

The attempts of Gids clinicians to raise concerns about safeguarding and the medical approach were ignored or worse . The then medical director heard concerns but did not act; ditto the Speak up Guardian and the Tavistock and Portman NHS foundation trust management. I was a senior consultant psychiatrist, and it was in my role as staff representative on the trust council of governors that a large number of the Gids clinicians approached me with their grave concerns. This formed the basis of the report submitted to the board in 2018. The trust then conducted a “review” of Gids, based only on interviewing staff. The CEO stated that the review did not identify any “failings in the overall approach taken by the service in responding to the needs of the young people and families who access its support”. I was threatened with disciplinary action . When the child safeguarding lead, Sonia Appleby, raised her concerns before the trust’s review, the trust threatened her with an investigation; and its response, as an employment tribunal later confirmed, damaged her professional reputation and stood in the way of her safeguarding work.

Characterising a child as “being transgender” is harmful as it forecloses the situation and also implies that this is a unitary condition for which there is unitary “treatment”. It is much more helpful to use a description: that the child suffers from distress in relation to gender/sexuality, and this needs to be carefully explored in terms of the narrative of their lives, the presence of other difficulties such as autism, depression, histories of abuse and trauma, and confusion about sexuality. As the Cass report notes, studies suggest that a high proportion of these children are same-sex attracted, and many suffer from homophobia. Concerned gay and lesbian clinicians have said they experienced homophobia in the service, and that staff worked in a “climate of fear”.

It is misleading to suggest that I and others who have raised these concerns are hostile to transgender people – we believe they should be able to live their lives free of discrimination, and we want them to have safe, evidence-based holistic healthcare. What we have opposed is the precipitate placing of children on a potentially damaging medical pathway for which there is considerable evidence of risk of harm. We emphasised the need, before taking such steps, to spend considerable time exploring this complex and multifaceted clinical presentation. Young people and clinicians routinely refer to “top surgery” and “bottom surgery”, terms that serve to seriously underplay these major surgical procedures, ie double mastectomy, removal of pelvic organs and fashioning of constructed penis or vagina. These procedures carry very serious risks such as urinary incontinence, vaginal atrophy, cardiovascular complications and many others we are only beginning to learn about. There is a very serious risk of sexual dysfunction and sterility.

There are no reliable studies (for children or adults) that could support claims of low levels of regret. The studies often quoted (eg Bustos et al 2021) have been criticised for using inadequate and erroneous data . The critical issue here is the fact that children and young people who were put on a medical pathway were not followed up. Studies suggest that the majority of detransitioners, a growing population, who are having to deal with the consequences of having been put on a medical pathway, do not return to the clinics as they are very fearful of the consequences. The fact that there are no dedicated NHS services for detransitioners is symptomatic of the NHS’s lack of concern for this group. Many live very lonely and isolated lives.

Those who say a child has been “born in the wrong body”, and who have sidelined child safeguarding, bear a very heavy responsibility. Parents have been asked “Do you want a happy little girl or a dead little boy?” Cass notes that rates of suicidality are similar to rates among non-trans identified youth referred to child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS). Indeed, the NHS lead for suicide prevention, Prof Sir Louis Appleby, has said “invoking suicide in this debate is mistaken and potentially harmful”.

It has been suggested that the Cass report sought to “appease” various interests, with the implication that those who have promoted these potentially damaging treatments have been sidelined. But in reality, it is those of us who have raised these concerns who have been silenced by trans rights activists who have had considerable success in closing down debate, including preventing conferences going ahead. Doctors and scientists have said that they have been deterred from conducting studies in this area by a climate of fear, and faced great personal costs for speaking out, ranging from harassment to professional risks and even, as Cass has experienced, safety concerns in public.

The pendulum is already swinging towards a reassertion of rationality. Cass’s achievement is to give that pendulum a hugely increased momentum. In years to come we will look back at the damage done to children with incredulity and horror.

David Bell is a retired psychiatrist and former president of the British Psychoanalytic Society

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Guest Essay

I Thought the Bragg Case Against Trump Was a Legal Embarrassment. Now I Think It’s a Historic Mistake.

By Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Mr. Shugerman is a law professor at Boston University.

About a year ago, when Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, indicted former President Donald Trump, I was critical of the case and called it an embarrassment. I thought an array of legal problems would and should lead to long delays in federal courts.

After listening to Monday’s opening statement by prosecutors, I still think the district attorney has made a historic mistake. Their vague allegation about “a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election” has me more concerned than ever about their unprecedented use of state law and their persistent avoidance of specifying an election crime or a valid theory of fraud.

To recap: Mr. Trump is accused in the case of falsifying business records. Those are misdemeanor charges. To elevate it to a criminal case, Mr. Bragg and his team have pointed to potential violations of federal election law and state tax fraud. They also cite state election law, but state statutory definitions of “public office” seem to limit those statutes to state and local races.

Both the misdemeanor and felony charges require that the defendant made the false record with “intent to defraud.” A year ago, I wondered how entirely internal business records (the daily ledger, pay stubs and invoices) could be the basis of any fraud if they are not shared with anyone outside the business. I suggested that the real fraud was Mr. Trump’s filing an (allegedly) false report to the Federal Election Commission, and that only federal prosecutors had jurisdiction over that filing.

A recent conversation with Jeffrey Cohen, a friend, Boston College law professor and former prosecutor, made me think that the case could turn out to be more legitimate than I had originally thought. The reason has to do with those allegedly falsified business records: Most of them were entered in early 2017, generally before Mr. Trump filed his Federal Election Commission report that summer. Mr. Trump may have foreseen an investigation into his campaign, leading to its financial records. He may have falsely recorded these internal records before the F.E.C. filing as consciously part of the same fraud: to create a consistent paper trail and to hide intent to violate federal election laws, or defraud the F.E.C.

In short: It’s not the crime; it’s the cover-up.

Looking at the case in this way might address concerns about state jurisdiction. In this scenario, Mr. Trump arguably intended to deceive state investigators, too. State investigators could find these inconsistencies and alert federal agencies. Prosecutors could argue that New York State agencies have an interest in detecting conspiracies to defraud federal entities; they might also have a plausible answer to significant questions about whether New York State has jurisdiction or whether this stretch of a state business filing law is pre-empted by federal law.

However, this explanation is a novel interpretation with many significant legal problems. And none of the Manhattan district attorney’s filings or today’s opening statement even hint at this approach.

Instead of a theory of defrauding state regulators, Mr. Bragg has adopted a weak theory of “election interference,” and Justice Juan Merchan described the case , in his summary of it during jury selection, as an allegation of falsifying business records “to conceal an agreement with others to unlawfully influence the 2016 election.”

As a reality check: It is legal for a candidate to pay for a nondisclosure agreement. Hush money is unseemly, but it is legal. The election law scholar Richard Hasen rightly observed , “Calling it election interference actually cheapens the term and undermines the deadly serious charges in the real election interference cases.”

In Monday’s opening argument, the prosecutor Matthew Colangelo still evaded specifics about what was illegal about influencing an election, but then he claimed , “It was election fraud, pure and simple.” None of the relevant state or federal statutes refer to filing violations as fraud. Calling it “election fraud” is a legal and strategic mistake, exaggerating the case and setting up the jury with high expectations that the prosecutors cannot meet.

The most accurate description of this criminal case is a federal campaign finance filing violation. Without a federal violation (which the state election statute is tethered to), Mr. Bragg cannot upgrade the misdemeanor counts into felonies. Moreover, it is unclear how this case would even fulfill the misdemeanor requirement of “intent to defraud” without the federal crime.

In stretching jurisdiction and trying a federal crime in state court, the Manhattan district attorney is now pushing untested legal interpretations and applications. I see three red flags raising concerns about selective prosecution upon appeal.

First, I could find no previous case of any state prosecutor relying on the Federal Election Campaign Act either as a direct crime or a predicate crime. Whether state prosecutors have avoided doing so as a matter of law, norms or lack of expertise, this novel attempt is a sign of overreach.

Second, Mr. Trump’s lawyers argued that the New York statute requires that the predicate (underlying) crime must also be a New York crime, not a crime in another jurisdiction. The district attorney responded with judicial precedents only about other criminal statutes, not the statute in this case. In the end, the prosecutors could not cite a single judicial interpretation of this particular statute supporting their use of the statute (a plea deal and a single jury instruction do not count).

Third, no New York precedent has allowed an interpretation of defrauding the general public. Legal experts have noted that such a broad “election interference” theory is unprecedented, and a conviction based on it may not survive a state appeal.

Mr. Trump’s legal team also undercut itself for its decisions in the past year: His lawyers essentially put all of their eggs in the meritless basket of seeking to move the trial to federal court, instead of seeking a federal injunction to stop the trial entirely. If they had raised the issues of selective or vindictive prosecution and a mix of jurisdictional, pre-emption and constitutional claims, they could have delayed the trial past Election Day, even if they lost at each federal stage.

Another reason a federal crime has wound up in state court is that President Biden’s Justice Department bent over backward not to reopen this valid case or appoint a special counsel. Mr. Trump has tried to blame Mr. Biden for this prosecution as the real “election interference.” The Biden administration’s extra restraint belies this allegation and deserves more credit.

Eight years after the alleged crime itself, it is reasonable to ask if this is more about Manhattan politics than New York law. This case should serve as a cautionary tale about broader prosecutorial abuses in America — and promote bipartisan reforms of our partisan prosecutorial system.

Nevertheless, prosecutors should have some latitude to develop their case during trial, and maybe they will be more careful and precise about the underlying crime, fraud and the jurisdictional questions. Mr. Trump has received sufficient notice of the charges, and he can raise his arguments on appeal. One important principle of “ our Federalism ,” in the Supreme Court’s terms, is abstention , that federal courts should generally allow state trials to proceed first and wait to hear challenges later.

This case is still an embarrassment, in terms of prosecutorial ethics and apparent selectivity. Nevertheless, each side should have its day in court. If convicted, Mr. Trump can fight many other days — and perhaps win — in appellate courts. But if Monday’s opening is a preview of exaggerated allegations, imprecise legal theories and persistently unaddressed problems, the prosecutors might not win a conviction at all.

Jed Handelsman Shugerman (@jedshug) is a law professor at Boston University.

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