Are we becoming less creative? In a joint study by Harvard and University of Washington (Davis and Weinstein, 2013) the researchers compared  creative writing by teenagers to determine if creativity was increasing or decreasing. Their conclusion was a decline existed in writing, which became simpler and more mundane. Davis concluded that ” markers of creativity—like complexity and risk-taking and breaking away from the standard mold—that appear to have changed.”_[1]

The creative writer combines originality, complexity, independence of judgment, and aesthetic sensitivity according to the research of Frank Barron. Who is this man and why is he telling us what constitutes creativity? Barron was an American psychologist with a PhD from U.C. Berkeley. He spent about thirty years studying creative people and wrote a series of studies on their nature and habits. I find these works which he wrote from the 1960s through 1990s surprisingly direct for someone who is considered a philosopher and an academic. (If that doesn’t interest you, Barron also did research on the use of psychedelic drugs.) _[2]

Barron is considered a pioneer in the psychology of creativity and in the study of human personality, who was known for his in-depth studies of the creative mind. His subjects often took extremely complex elements to produce a final product that was elegant and deceptively simple. He found that creative people could hold two opposite views at the same time and yet see no contraction. Basically, they could be both naïve and knowledgeable, emotional and logical, or disciplined and free spirited.

Such dichotomies tend to become better integrated as people grow older. For creative adults in their twenties, this lack of integration may appear as moodiness or fickle thinking. They are trying to balance ideas at opposite poles and they may push the envelope when it comes to being different from the previous generation, but not from their peers. In fact this age group exhibits more conformity to peers than many others.

Comparing your work to others is second nature. But, originality is determined by how an idea differs from those of one’s peers. So, a writer who wants to stand out from the crowd still has to do their research and find out what other authors are doing. Yet to rise above the bar set by the rest, you must take the risk of not imitating but differentiating yourself. This is particularly true when dealing with other famous authors. There are enough people trying to imitate them. If you do the same your chances of being noticed by the public only decrease. Generating ideas that are different from others is where your value as an author is found. 

[1] Kelley, P. A decline in creativity? It depends on how you look, University of Washington News and Information, November 14, 2013

[2] Barron, Frank and Harrington, David M., Creativity, Intelligence, and Personality by Frank Barron. Annual Review of Psychology, 32 (1981): 439–476