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The Nature of Creative Thought - Part 1

There is not a great deal of difference in the mental processes of creative minds, whether the minds belong to artists, writers, scientists, musicians, medical researchers, or business executives.

Some individuals may take exception to this, feeling that their problems are so "different" that their mental processes must also be different. But their problems, as we shall see in the next chap­ter, aren't really so different after all. And their mental processes are really quite similar, as we shall try to demonstrate in this chapter.

The difficulty is one of perception. It is difficult to see the simi­larities because of the surface appearances. The artist, writer, scientist, and business executive do move in different "thought worlds" in that the words, or "symbols" of thought, are some­what different. Then, too, very real differences in talents and aptitudes are called for. And it is the exercise and domination of these that determine whether a creative mind will initially turn toward art, music, science, or business as an outlet.

Ben Hecht, the successful author of many books, articles, and short stories, in addition to more than seventy motion-picture screen plays, pointed out the ways in which writers differ from other types of creative workers in an article in the February, 1959, Esquire:

The writer is a definite human phenomenon. He is almost a type— as pugilists are a type. He may be a bad writer—an insipid one or a clumsy one—but there is a bug in him that keeps spinning yarns; and that bulges his brow a bit, narrows his jaws, weakens his eyes, and gives him girl children instead of boys. Nobody but a writer can write. People who hang around writers for years ... who are much smarter and have much better taste, never learn to write.

... The writer, put in any active group of men, will always collapse as a dominant. He will be the least listened to in any mixed company. Even other writers shy at hearing a writer sound off.

The reason is sort of biologic. A writer's ego goes into the game of solitaire he plays with plot turns and speeches. He has, usually, little left over for the domination of the realities around him. A long-suffering wife or an aging concubine are usually the only human be­ings before whom he can strut successfully.*

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