To Be a Better Writer: Write More Books

In today’s New York Times, author Stephen King challenges a common belief:

The more one writes, the less remarkable one’s work is apt to be.

He agrees that there are a few super-prolific writers who aren’t great writers; mystery novelist John Creasey, who’s written 564 novels under 21 different pseudonyms; and Barbara Cartland, with over 700 novels.

But King argues that these are exceptions: the general pattern is that, the more you write, the better a writer you are. Examples include Joyce Carol Oates (over 60 novels) and Agatha Christie (91 novels) and Isaac Asimov (more than 500 books).

King himself has published almost 60 novels. So maybe we should be suspicious of his argument?

The New York Times calls Stephen King’s article an “Opinion” but his claim is scientifically proven, according to the latest creativity research. Researchers like Professor Dean Keith Simonton have studied huge databases of creators, looking at both their creative quality and also their productivity. No matter how you judge creativity, the most creative writers are also the most prolific.

Not only that: if you examine a random one-year period, higher productivity in that year is typically correlated with the likelihood that you’ll do your greatest work in that same year.

The same pattern holds in every creative field, whether music, science, dance, inventions, patents. More productivity is correlated with bigger impact and greater likelihood of generating a major, influential single work.*

This is surprising to most of us. We think that you’ll generate your magnum opus only after years of intense focus. You work on one masterpiece, ignoring all distractions–including those other second-rate book ideas. Why wouldn’t a writer just pick the one awesome idea, and focus all energies on that?

Because that’s not the way creativity works. Creativity doesn’t come from one brilliant idea, emerging one morning after a strange dream. The belief in the big flash of insight is largely a myth. Creative products emerge, over time, from hard work. During the hard work, lots of small, tiny ideas come every day. They get woven into the unfolding work–and this takes skill, experience, and focus.

Another reason creativity doesn’t come from an all-consuming focus on one project: It’s because creators themselves don’t know, ahead of time, which ideas will pan out. Often, an idea that they love turns out to be a dead end. If you can’t know ahead of time which idea will change the world, then you could waste years going down the wrong path.

The take-home message: Work on lots of projects, in parallel. Don’t ever be convinced that a particular idea is the one that will make you famous. And if you’re not generating a lot of work, you’re not as creative as you could be.

*I review this research in my book Explaining Creativity: The Science of Innovation (second edition) Oxford University Press.

The Economist Shouts: “Set Innovation Free!”

The cover story of this influential British magazine is “Set Innovation Free!”* The subtitle says what they really mean:

Time to fix the patent system.

In this blog, I’ve argued that the current patent regime retards overall innovation. It’s not aligned with empirical studies of creativity research. Patents are awarded to a single entity, as if that entity is completely responsible for the advance in knowledge. But research shows that all innovations are collaborative and distributed.

Defenders of patents will say: First, the potential reward of a patent provides an incentive to innovate. Why invest all the money in researching a new cancer drug if you don’t get the exclusive rights to market it? Second, in exchange for being granted a patent, you’re required to make your innovation public. This is supposed to help everyone else move forward faster with their own innovations.

The Economist  lead editorial argues that this is completely wrong. It cites evidence that, across industries and countries, stronger patent systems don’t lead to greater innovation. It points out that in most cases, patents never really become public, because patent lawyers have become very effective at writing complicated text that makes it impossible to tell what the real innovation is. Patents are expensive; it takes about $100,000 to go through the process of getting one. And yet, by some measures less than ten percent of these patents are ever used; the rest never make any money. So why spend the money to get patents? It’s subtle, but basically, it’s related to a finding from innovation research: that almost all new products involve tens, hundreds, of new ideas. New products are never  based on a single patent. So for lots of companies, filing a bunch of patents is a defensive strategy–it creates a “patent thicket” that prevents competitors from putting together all of the ideas they need to develop their own successful product. The current state of the technology sector is that all of the big players have their own patent thickets. So before anything new can be sold to the consumer, their lawyers have to get together and negotiate about their mutual patent thickets. (Yes, that’s the word that patent lawyers use–patent thicket. The fact that there’s such a word at all shows how big the problem is!)

The patent system rewards huge companies with deep pockets and lots of expensive lawyers. It blocks startups and entrepreneurs. Maybe there are exceptions? For example, pharmaceutical patents that emerge from university research labs, with a startup that’s funded by the university’s research office? But aren’t universities also big institutions with lots of lawyers? Patents do nothing for the little guy.

Patents are granted for too long. No technology company needs 20 years of protection for their idea. How many of you still own computers from 20 years ago?

Patents are granted for “new” “ideas” that are much too obvious: does Apple really have a patent on “rectangular tablets with rounded corners”? (Apparently, they do.) And yet, U.S. patent law says that to get a patent, your idea has to be non-obvious. I’ve written about problems with the non-obviousness doctrine here, and it’s a big topic of discussion among IP lawyers and scholars.

The Economist  cover story could be straight out of my book Group Genius:

Sharing brings huge benefits to society. Sharing leads to extra innovation. Ideas overlap. Inventions depend on earlier creative advances. There would be no jazz without the blues. Innovation today is less about entirely novel breakthroughs, and more about the clever combination and extension of existing ideas.

The chorus of creativity researchers shouts “Amen!”

*August 8-14, 2015 issue

Leonardo da Vinci Artist Statement

This is hilarious, even if it’s a bit over the top. It’s from “The Artist Statements of the Old Masters” by John Seed:

If the great European artists of the past were alive today, what kinds of statements would they need to write to explain and justify their work?

I originally proposed “La Giaconda” as a non-specific vehicle to map coded and opposed systems of selfhood and gender that could be substantiated via an intertextual nexus. Through a personal discursive process, it then evolved towards a self-referential “otherness” that overlays Neo-Platonic androgyny re-defined as an ontology of the unsaid.
–Leonardo da Vinci