I’m going to talk about creativity. Women’s creativity, to be more specific. Women writers’ creativity, to be even more specific. And I’m going to use the wise and wondrous Fay Weldon as a case study.
I grew up reading Fay Weldon. Long before I became a writer myself, I was being challenged and shocked and entertained by her novels, pouncing on each new one as soon as it came out in paperback. The early ones are still on my bookshelf in a long, brittle, yellowing row.
She was always stirring up controversy and always ahead of her time. She was writing feminist novels long before they become fashionable. She had already published two bestselling novels and four plays before the famous feminist publisher Virago was founded in 1973, and a further four novels and three plays before The Women’s Press kicked off in 1977.
Her books were about body image and gender stereotypes, rebellion and revenge. I remember discussing them with my women’s group when I was living in Oxford in the 1980s. Our group’s still going strong, by the way, making us possibly the longest-running consciousness-raising group in the UK. In the old days, body hair and political lesbianism were our hot topics; these days its more likely to be trans rights and – er – HRT.
But Fay kept on writing throughout.
By the time I started Mslexia in 1999 she’d written 24 bestselling adult novels and four children’s stories, four books of nonfiction, 18 plays and four TV series – including the very first Upstairs Downstairs script.
From the start, Fay was a great supporter of Mslexia. She was one of our first guest judges, selecting from poems and short stories submitted for Issue 4 of the magazine – on the topic of ‘fat ladies’, naturally, a cause that was always dear to her heart. (I’ll come back to that later.)
She was also a regular interviewee on the Mslexia Roadshow tours, and crossed swords with me publicly about women-only publishing at a sell-out event in a vast marquee at the Charleston Festival.
And she was a founder member of Mslexia’s Club 34, a campaign urging women writers to lie about their true ages and claim to be 34 – whatever their age – as a cheeky way of undermining the many literary grants and prizes that have an upper age-limit of 35. We argued that women tend to start writing far later than men, because juggling day jobs with motherhood leaves little time for writing, so any upper age limit automatically discriminates against women.
Our recent survey of over 2,000 women writers at Mslexia found that 38 per cent started writing seriously in their 30s and 40s and 16 per cent didn’t start writing seriously until their 50s and 60s.
Fay was a case in point. Considering her prolific output, it’s amazing to realise that her literary career didn’t start until she was 35, when her first play was televised. Here’s how she describes writing that play, when she was heavily pregnant with her son Daniel.
‘I wait and wait for the baby to come. It doesn’t. It is very hot. June moves into July. I can hardly stand up. I have to do something with my time. I write a TV play... It’s about a man, of course – plays are, at that time – but the women have all the best lines...
‘I write by hand, and get a friend to type the play out because of the embargo about typing in the house.’
I’m going to interrupt here, to explain that Fay’s husband tried to stop her writing in the early days of the marriage, and didn’t allow her to use a typewriter in the house – ‘because the tap tap tapping annoyed him,’ she said. It seems bizarre that she put up with this – but she was deeply in love and women put up with a lot back in those days.
Even now, 40 years later, not all women have partners who nurture their creativity. Another of our big surveys found that although two thirds of women writers were ‘very satisfied’ or ‘tolerably satisfied’ with their partner’s attitude to their work – one in eight were ‘disappointed’ and two percent were ‘very angry or unhappy’ about their situation.
Anyway, back to Fay’s first play.
‘I call the doctor who is startled to find I haven’t given birth yet and says I really have to go into hospital to have the baby induced – now...
‘I put the play in an envelope: I feel the same awe of it as I did of the story I wrote when I was 11, about a railway station... I know the play has an existence outside myself: I simply deliver it, as a midwife delivers a baby...
‘I get the taxi to stop on the way to the University College Hospital where my father trained and where I am to have the baby, and put [the play] through the letterbox on the corner of Regent’s Park Road and Primrose Hill Road... and three violent hours later Daniel has burst flailing into the world.’
With a babe-in-arms, another young son at school, and a teenage stepdaughter to look after, Fay was unable to go back to her job at the advertising agency. This is how she described her situation in her memoir:
‘I am now... locked in by motherhood. Steamrollered. What I do from now on... is write.’
The attentive readers among you will have noticed that mention of the first story she ever wrote – at the age of 11 – and how strange and transformative she found the experience. Here she is again, talking about that early childhood foray into creative writing.
‘It was only two pages, but see what words on a page could bring to life! Lyttleton railway station at night, its vaulted steam-filled arches, the melancholy of the steam whistle, tired travellers, drawn faces, the pleasure and despair of other people’s journeys... which I’d nailed and trapped in time.
‘Write and then rewrite: it was like bringing a piece of sculpture out of dead stone: you could make things more real than real; you could make something where there was nothing before; you could have new people come to you out of the steam, make them do what you wanted, send them off again into the mists and they’d go on walking forever.
‘I remember the look of it on the page to this day. I was both awed and spooked.’
‘Awed and spooked’ – those words suggest something almost paranormal was going on when that first story emerged from her imagination.
In the past, writers routinely assumed that creativity came to them by paranormal means. ‘All good poets ...are inspired and possessed,’ wrote Plato. ‘This is the tale I pray the divine Muse to unfold...,’ wrote Homer at the start of The Odyssey. And here’s Milton describing the process of inspiration in Paradise Lost: ‘My celestial patroness, who... dictates to me, slumbering, or inspires easy my unpremeditated verse’.
Many writers today share that sense that creativity is not entirely under their control. ‘You have to make yourself into a Ouija board, so as to call down the spirits,’ novelist A L Kennedy told me when I interviewed her for Mslexia. ‘The key is not to be self-conscious,’ said Pat Barker when I was talking to her a few months ago about her new book. ‘It’s about the story revealing itself to you.’
The feeling of submitting to something uncontrollable comes up again and again in conversations with writers: ‘You have to believe that your unconscious knows what it’s doing,’ said poet Kathleen Jamie. Novelist Barbara Trapido talked of a story ‘lying under the surface, and you’re trying to dredge it up’. Poet Jane Hirschfield echoes Milton when she says, ‘I feel myself as much amanuensis as author’, referring to her sense, when her words are flowing, that they’re being dictated by a higher intelligence.
This idea that creativity is something mysterious, suggests that creative people may be fundamentally different from ordinary mortals. But decades of research reveals that the differences have far more to do with how creatives approach their work than with any talent they’re born with – and that creativity is more of an attitude than an attribute.
One way to study creativity is to look at exceptionally creative people, to see what else they have in common. Over the years many studies of this kind have been done. (I should probably explain here that I trained as a psychologist before turning to writing, and I try to keep up with what’s going on – so that I can bombard Mslexia’s readers with all the latest research findings.)
One study followed a group of 67 highly creative women, from their sophomore year in California, right up to the present day. The creative women were found to have been markedly more tomboyish as children than other girls their age, and continued to be unconventional as they matured. They were also rather fretful and thoughtful. They liked to mull things over and come to their own conclusions, which often differed from those of the people around them.
This meant that they were often ahead of their time. Does this sound like someone we know?
In her introduction to her selection of ‘fat ladies’ stories and poems for Mslexia, Fay recalled that,
‘The first novel I ever wrote was The Fat Woman’s Joke. It told the story of Esther, a middle-aged housewife who goes on a diet with her executive husband. Gradually both their lives fall apart: because it was food – her exquisite cooking, his grateful eating – that had bound them together.
‘He has an affair; she runs away to live in a basement flat to compulsively eat, read science fiction, and rant away to her pert little dieting friend Phyllis, about what we would now call “gender relations” but which was then rather new and strange...’
The Fat Woman’s Joke came out over ten years before Susie Orbach’s famous Fat is a Feminist Issue – that’s how far ahead of the times Fay was. The novel became a bestseller, and Fay was hailed as a feminist author – but she was she was regularly in hot water for failing to toe the ideological line. Here’s what she wrote in Mslexia about an early skirmish.
‘I wrote an article for a US woman’s magazine once, pointing out that thin is best, that skinny women earn more than fat women, work in Reception not the back office, marry richer husbands, have more lovers, go to smarter restaurants, die with more jewellery... Nor is it a male conspiracy to keep women in their place, I argued. The same phenomenon occurs with tall men, who earn more and have higher status than short men.
‘Uproar, total uproar, among the readers. Feminists, the Bible Belt, nutritionists, “overweight women”, short men, all united to give me a hard time. l was being “fattist”, was the general complaint...
‘But it’s true, I insisted. Thin is best. Research proves it. Just because a thing shouldn’t be so, doesn’t mean it isn’t.’
Returning to that research with those 67 cantankerous young Californian creatives: the women were retested at six-year intervals to see how their early promise had been realised. By the age of 43 they had divided into two groups: those who had become productive creative ‘careerists’ – and those who hadn’t.
Now this is where it gets interesting: because the successful careerists were no more talented than the others. But they were far more persistent, ambitious, confident and independent – and had been so from childhood. The creative women who hadn’t realised their potential, on the other hand, were even less confident and persistent than the control group – and all had abandoned their creative careers by the age of 30.
The successful creative women refused to close down their options. As children they were independent rebels; as adults they resisted the domestic pigeonhole, struggling to combine creative work with family responsibilities.
A more recent piece of research, involving a much larger cohort of nearly 3,000 people, comparing the creativity of men and women, found that the sexes were equally matched in terms of conscientiousness, openness and neuroticism – but that that the creative women were noticeably more bolshie and argumentative than the creative men.
The creative furrow is clearly not an easy one to plough, especially for women. And the mountain of research into the association between creativity and mental illness bears this out – with writers more affected than any other kind of artist. Twelve years ago, we tested this out with a survey of over 3,000 women writers. We discovered that, while 29 per cent of women in the general population had been treated for some kind of mental health issue, among our writers the figure was 69 per cent – well over twice as many. But that’s a subject for another day, and another talk...
What is relevant today is the role of early stress in the development of the creative personality. One survey found that 28 per cent of exceptionally creative people had lost a parent as a child, compared with just eight per cent of the general population. It’s been suggested that misfortunes of this magnitude may jolt a child out of her normal patterns of thought, and force her to consider alternatives – which results in the characteristic openness of the creative personality.
Serious illness, migration, even a change of school, have been found to have a similar effect. Novelist Margaret Atwood was taken to live in a forest cabin without electricity when she was a girl. Poet Selima Hill was sent to a Roman Catholic school by her staunchly atheist parents. Black author Bernardine Evaristo went to an all-white school, and had to negotiate the prickly politics of her mother’s white family and her father’s Nigerian background.
And Fay Weldon was uprooted repeatedly as a child – from Christchurch to Aukland in New Zealand, and later to England – and experienced her parents’ separation at the age of 5, and their later divorce. She had the added discombobulation of being named Franklin on her birth certificate and on official documents – because her mother was expecting a boy – but being called Fay in everyday life.
‘I started out in a state of ambivalence,’ she wrote. ‘I took out library books as Franklin and read them as Fay.’
It’s possible that the association between creativity and madness is also forged at this point: when a gifted child is forced by circumstances to question their approach to the world. Those who weather the storm go on to become fulfilled, albeit troubled, artists. Those who don’t, may retreat into mental illness. Fay’s sister Jane became mentally ill; Fay turned to psychoanalysis – and writing.
‘A writer needs a fair bit of introspection to succeed,’ she wrote in her bracing guide for would-be authors Why Will No-one Publish My Novel? ‘Know who you are, what you are, and why you are writing... I spent five years in analysis before I was sane enough to write anything longer or more interesting than an advertisement, poor craven wretch of a copywriter that I was back then.’
In recent decades there has been a flurry of research by psychologists trying to develop theories to explain creativity – without resorting to paranormal inspiration. The most broadly accepted of these was formulated by Teresa Amabile at Harvard 40 years ago and still makes a lot of sense today.
She proposed that creativity is a combination of three basic elements. The first element is motivation: the determination and passion of the true artist.
The second element is something psychologists call ‘cognitive style’, which is basically the way we approach a particular problem or activity. Creative ‘cognitive styles’ are enquiring, open-ended and flexible; imbued with the independence of mind I mentioned earlier, that is found in all surveys of creative people.
The third element is skill and knowledge in the field of creative endeavour. Applied to writing, this means reading widely, researching your subject, and honing your craft until it’s second nature.
According to Amabile’s theory there are no short cuts. Genius really is one per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration. Sparks of creation are the consequence of energetic skilled activity, continued over a long time, by someone who is open-minded and absolutely passionate about their work. Like bushcraft legend Ray Mears, conjuring fire from a hank of lichen and two sticks: if you know how, and keep at it, the flame will eventually catch and flare.
There are other theories, of course. Donald Campbell’s involved even more perspiration. He thought that creativity operates like Darwinian selection. Ideas are generated at random, and the best ones selected for further development. Exceptionally creative people simply have a wider knowledge base from which to generate ideas, and different strategies for selecting which to focus on.
In Cambell’s world, a chimpanzee with a typewriter and limitless time would indeed write Hamlet eventually, provided she was able to appreciate the value of the random patterns she was typing.
This whole Bardic chimp scenario was challenged just a few weeks ago by a couple of Australian mathematicians, who worked out that there is only a 5 per cent chance that a chimp typing at the rate of one keystroke per second would type the word ‘banana’ in its own lifetime. And the probability of it writing a sentence such as ‘I chimp, therefore I am’ is one in 10 million billion billion – but I digress...
Hans Eysenck’s theory proposed that creative cognitive styles result from different levels of dopamine and serotonin in the brain – leading to an openness to new ideas and a general lack of inhibition. He, too, acknowledged the vital importance of knowledge, skill and persistence – plus something he called ‘ego strength’, to account for that all-important independence of mind, which he thought was all that stands between the artist and the mental hospital.
Then there’s Sternberg’s ‘investment theory’, Edward de Bono’s ‘thinking hats’, Kirton’s ‘innovator adapter’ continuum. I could go on...
However, most recent research has concentrated on testing and tinkering with Amabile’s three-element theory: that creativity is the result of motivation, plus cognitive style, plus craft.
A lot of attention has been paid to that first element: motivation. It’s been discovered, for example, that creative motivation can’t be increased by the promise of additional financial reward. The primary motivation has to be intrinsic, i.e. arising from the work itself. If money is the only motive, the creative spark is far less likely to catch fire.
A team of German neuropsychologists went further and found that certain parts of artists’ brains are less responsive to the promise of monetary reward than the equivalent brain areas of non-artists. Which could explain why so many of us poor writers are prepared to work so hard for so little payment – or no payment at all. Indeed, figures from the Society of Authors reveal that the average earnings of professional writers have plummeted in the last 20 years. Yet on we go...
For Fay – who was the main breadwinner in the family – necessity was also the mother of invention. Here’s her describing how her 13th novel, The Hearts and Minds of Men, came about in 1988. She had 4 sons by this time, by the way.
‘Once upon a time I was asked to write a serial for a leading women’s weekly – not a glossy, the opposite, with middle-market recipes, knitting patterns, advice on how to line the curtains and how to catch your man.
‘Every week they’d carry two or three romantic short stories of a Mills & Boon flavour... Now the editor had the bright idea of a serial to fit the space in between the ads, either 1,000 or 2,000 words, depending, to be delivered each week. He envisaged perhaps 12 episodes, starting as soon as possible.
‘I said yes.
‘As it happened it ran for 50 weeks or so before the editor said, ‘that’s enough – my other writers are complaining you’re taking up too much space.’ It turned out to be a great training for me.
On a Thursday I’d get the early train up to London where my typist would be waiting... a two-hour journey – and write the episode by hand. The motorcycle messenger would call to collect at lunchtime.
‘I allowed myself no time for editing or rewriting, let alone for second thoughts. A deadline is a deadline and has to be met. That was a year of no holidays, no illnesses, just all the discipline – and the fun, I must say – of The Hearts and Lives of Men, the title I gave it.
‘I think the editor must have thought the novel was already written and that I was doling it out meanly week by week, not that I was making it up as I went along. He would have been horrified if he’d thought about the mechanics of it. (So am I, in retrospect.)’
She also wrote one other novel, one play, and the first of her four children’s novels that year. If that’s not motivation, I don’t know what is.
Research into Amabile’s second element – cognitive style – has focused on attempts to encourage people to adopt a more creative approach to their work. The assumption here is that education, and society generally, actively discourage creativity – by insisting we follow regimented rules of thought and behaviour. This process transforms bright curious children into plodding law-abiding adults: perfect for hod-lifting and pen-pushing, but not ideal for Great Leaps Forward in originality.
Tests conducted in America by creativity guru George Land found that five-year-olds were over three times as creative as ten-year-olds, eight times as creative as 15-year-olds – and 49 times as creative as American adults. With the consequences we are all now witnessing.
This is why you’ll find besuited business execs playing with Lego or pondering ways of escaping from a locked room armed with a raw potato and a rubber band. This is why Roger von Oech developed his million-selling Whack Pack, a set of cards bearing a series of bizarre one-line instructions to ‘whack’ jaded middle-managers out of their habitual modes of thinking.
A good writing workshop can serve this ‘whack’ function for writers too. I’d been working for years as a journalist, and already had a novel in print, when I went to my first writing workshop. And, honestly, it completely transformed how I approached my work.
This brings me onto the last of Amabile’s three basic elements: craft. Of the three, this is the one most amenable to training.
Back in 1994 only eight universities in the UK offered postgraduate degree courses in creative writing. Today – just 30 years later – there are over 200 postgraduate courses, and over 400 at undergraduate level, plus an unknown number of short courses, masterclasses and workshops. These days you can get an MA in poetry or writing for children; a BA in writing about yourself. You can even submit your first novel for a PhD.
If you’ve ever signed up for a creative writing course, you’ll probably have had a dinner-party or pub encounter with a man who says, ‘How can you be taught how to write? Surely it’s an ability you’re born with?’ (He’s the same man who, on hearing that you’re writing a novel, will quip, ‘Ooh, I’d better be careful what I say, or you’ll put me in your book’.)
The ‘writing gene’ theory was challenged well over 200 years ago by Sir Walter Besant, the bewhiskered founder of the Society of Authors, who argued that would-be authors should realise ‘that Fiction is an Art and, like all other Arts, that it is governed by certain laws, methods and rules, which it is their first business to learn’. What’s more, ‘the laws of Fiction may be laid down and taught, with as much precision as the laws of harmony, perspective and proportion’.
Besant’s assertions were supported by poet T S Eliot. ‘The larger part of the labour of an author is critical labour,’ he wrote, ‘the labour of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing.’ What Eliot referred to as ‘this frightful toil’, was he believed, eminently teachable.
‘It’s astonishing that people still claim that writing can’t be taught’, says Linda Anderson, who ran the MA at Lancaster University for years. ‘No one questions the role of teaching in the other arts. Everyone accepts you have to be taught to paint, or play an instrument.’ She says you only have to read the early work of some top writers to see that good writing is by no means innate. ‘If you compare the first paragraph of Herman Melville’s first novel, with the opening of Moby Dick the difference in quality is striking,’ she says. ‘And William Faulkner’s first books were unreadable.’
This suggests there may be more potentially great writers around than most people realise – and some are probably reading this right now.
‘If I’ve learnt anything in over 20 years of teaching,’ says poet Gillian Allnutt, ‘it’s never to assume someone can’t write. I’ve seen people write superficial banal stuff for months, until the right exercise or subject matter suddenly lifts them to a higher level.’
Nevertheless, I have to admit that every creative writing tutor I’ve ever interviewed believes that a proportion of the writing gift is innate. But I’d like to question where that so-called ‘innate ability’ comes from. Does an A S Byatt or a Martin Amis write well because they inherited the writing gene from their bookish forebears? Or is it, as I suspect, because they were steeped in sophisticated language and letters from infancy, and grew up believing that ‘writer’ was an attainable ambition?
Fay’s mother Margaret Jepson wrote literary novels under her own name, and romantic novels – often as many as four a year – under the nom de plume Pearl Bellairs. Fay’s uncle Selwyn Jepson was also a novelist; as was her grandfather Edgar Jepson. I’m guessing there were books all over the house when she was a child.
The importance of role models can’t be underestimated. When Mslexia was launched 26 years ago, men totally dominated the literary prize lists, reviews pages, university curricula and publishing companies. Their voices, their faces, their opinions, monopolised the broadcast media.
But the tables are turning. These days women are crowding onto the prize lists in ever greater numbers, and seizing the reins at publishing companies of all sizes. They’re enrolling on creative writing courses and forming writing groups. They’re making their own opportunities in self-publishing and performance.
According to one of our most recent surveys, this time last year, two-thirds of women are feeling more confident in their writing ability than they were 10 years ago, and one in three are feeling more motivated and more optimistic about getting published. It was writers like Fay who lit the blue touchpaper for this revolution.
She was appointed Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University in London in 2006, then moved to teach here at Bath Spa University in 2012 – at the ripe old age of 81, still writing, still as mischievous and outrageous as ever.
Of her teaching role, she said ‘a great writer needs a certain personality and a natural talent for language, but there is a great deal that can be taught’. And she outlined some of this in Why Will No-one Publish My Novel?, which was published when she was 86.
So which elements can be taught? ‘Technical matters,’ says novelist David Lodge, who taught creative writing for years. Also, ‘point of view, narrative voice, frame-breaking, time-shifting etc. – and to entertain a wider range of possibilities in these respects, than the writer might have discovered independently.’
‘Getting people to focus on their senses,’ says prize-winning author Ali Smith, who has taught at UEA and elsewhere. ‘And editing. When I teach writing, I always end up teaching people how to edit their work.’
‘Craft,’ says prizewinning novelist Monique Roffey. ‘If I hadn’t done the MA, I’d never have finished my novel. I didn’t know about plot structure. I didn’t know how to critique my own work. I had no idea what I was doing.’
A good tutor can save people years of flailing around in the wilderness. How long would Pat Barker have continued with her ‘polite ladies’ novels without Angela Carter’s electrifying advice on an Arvon course, to write about her Northern working-class background? ‘I’d rewritten my first novel five times,’ recalls Livi Michael, now an established literary and children’s author. ‘Then I took it to a course led by Jane Rogers and she told me to change the structure. She was absolutely right. I don’t think I’d have thought of that without her.’
There are precious few short cuts in the life of an author. A good creative writing course is one of them.
Here are the eight main reasons Fay gives for why a novel doesn’t get published. Some of them are easy to fix: sloppy grammar or old-fashioned language, for example; a stereotyped portrayal of a marginalised character, the lack of a decent synopsis. Others are more fundamental: lack of structure, a meandering plot.
But the two items at the top of her list were (a) that the novel is boring and (b) that it doesn’t have anything to say. And both of these problems, she maintained, are due to a lack of courage in the writer. Here’s how she put it:
‘If your novel is boring, it doesn’t mean you are a boring person... just that you may have failed to put into the novel the spark that makes you what you are...
‘It’s the hiding from the self, that makes one boring on the page. So forget any delusions that you’re a nice person. You’re as awful and evil as the worst person you ever imagined. This stuff has to come from somewhere...
‘If you try to hide yourself too much... readers will shut off because you have failed to engage them.’
Moving on to the second main problem, that the novel doesn’t seem to have anything to say, she suggests that this is because the writer has lost sight of the reason she started writing it in the first place.
‘Be brave and find it,’ she urges. ‘It’s in there somewhere. The good idea that launched the whole process. Whatever it was that compelled you to take up your pen or your keyboard.’
Chances are that the idea that fascinates and perhaps disturbs you the most is the one you need to focus on.
‘Pick the idea you really care about, the one that keeps asking you to work with it, the one that’s a bit frightening,’ urged A L Kennedy when she was judging our Women’s Short Story Competition a few years ago. Last year’s Poetry Competition judge Fiona Benson agreed. ‘Be true to your passions, and follow those thoughts onto the page.’
That’s exactly what last year’s winner did. Sue Burge had been writing seriously for two decades, but she’d never explored her childhood experience of her mother’s attempted suicide in her poems. ‘This was the first time I’d tackled this subject matter head-on – and it felt very raw and sad and personal,’ she told me. Yet that was the poem that won.
I’d add a ninth reason why a novel doesn’t get published – and that’s because it’s never submitted in the first place. Or submitted just once or twice, and then abandoned.
Fay developed an admirably thick skin during her years as a ‘poor craven wretch of a copywriter’, when her texts were repeatedly flung back at her to be rewritten. But the rest of us aren’t so robust. Our research at Mslexia found that women writers submit only a fraction of their work. Two thirds submit less than half of the manuscripts they finish. The rest submit even less. One woman had written eight complete novels but had submitted only three of them.
What seems to be happening here is that the experience of rejection of one specific piece of work, by one or more specific editors or agents, is assumed to apply to all future work by all future editors or agents. Where men tend to treat failure as a mere blip in their upward trajectory, and shrug it off without a dent in their egos, we women take rejection to heart and let it undermine our confidence.
Even at school, research shows that boys tend to attribute bad marks to laziness or bad luck – which makes them work harder – girls to lack of ability, which makes them lose heart.
Remember those 67 creative women in my first example? That difference between success and withdrawal is being played out every day among women writers everywhere.
And this really matters – because we have a lot to say! And the world needs to hear it.
In the 50th anniversary edition of the Journal of Creative Behaviour in 2017, the granddaddy of creativity research Robert Sternberg traced the trajectory of his theorising, from his ‘investment’ model of the 1970s that I mentioned earlier, to his marvellously titled ‘Defiance Theory of Creativity’ nearly four decades later.
This theory holds that creativity is a pervasive aspect of a person’s approach to the world, that is expressed in three ‘defiant’ ways. First, says Sternberg, ‘creative people defy the crowd’ by putting forward ‘ideas that challenge the existing order’ – which is why writers and artists are always in the vanguard of change in society. Second, they defy themselves, by challenging their own entrenched beliefs and ways of doing things. Finally, creative people defy the zeitgeist, ‘the set of presuppositions we often do not even consciously know we have’.
Here’s what Fay said about the power of creative writing to change the world, in her explosively controversial pamphlet Sacred Cows in 1989 – cause of yet another uproar amongst the chattering classes.
‘And while the wedding feast waited, the woman took weevilly meal and brackish water, and set them in a cracked bowl, and there was no good in them.
‘Then she added yeast and sour milk, and because the yeast was as manna, the dough rose. And she baked it in a good oven. And when it was cooked, it was divided into parts, and there was much nourishment in it, and rejoicing at the wedding feast.’
She went on to compare ‘good yeast’ to good writing.
‘If into the weevily meal, and the brackish water, of our awful awful society this good yeast is dropped, and allowed to fizz and fizzle, froth and foam to good purpose – all may yet be well.’
Thank you, Fay, for your fizz. And thank you to all women writers who dare to put their heads above the parapet.
DEBBIE TAYLOR is the founder and Editor of Mslexia magazine, where she has been researching factors that affect the careers, creativity and motivation of women writers for over 25 years. She has a doctorate in neuropsychology and has written for Oxfam, UNICEF, WHO and others about women and social issues. Her many books include narrative nonfiction, short stories and four critically acclaimed novels, the most recent being Herring Girl, a paranormal historical murder mystery. Debbie is also an experienced broadcaster and writing workshop tutor.
The Author
