Writer's block, an owner's guide: Can intrinsic motivation defeat writer’s block?

Teresa Amabile researches the social construction of creativity. That means what? It means that creativity is affected by your involvement with other people. You may think that’s obvious, but stay with me: we’re headed down some surprising alleys.

A group of students spent five minutes thinking about the intrinsic satisfactions of writing - the ways it makes you feel, the learning, growth and pride of being a creator. They were asked to rank these satisfactions in order. Another group spent five minutes thinking about the extrinsic reasons for writing, such as approval and wealth, and ranking them in order. After that everyone was asked to write a short poem.

Independent judges rated the first group’s poems markedly better.

This reminds us of Deci’s research finding that - in certain circumstances - people will work harder and longer if you don’t pay them.

First, let’s mention those writers whose first novels are enormously successful, who are hailed as rising young stars, and who never publish anything again. People who originally wrote for pleasure but whose later writing was undermined (or who feared it might be) by recognition and reward include Dostoevsky, Einstein, Eliot, Plath and Wolfe. One thing we’ll do today is try to understand why that happens.

We are talking, here, about intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is when you do a thing (like writing) because you want to. Because it pleases you, because just doing it is its own reward. In Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi’s language it’s an autotelic activity. In Mike Apter’s language, you are in the paratelic state.

So Amabile’s key conclusion, her Intrinsic Motivation Hypothesis of Creativity, is that “the intrinsically motivated state is conducive to creativity, whereas the extrinsically motivated state is detrimental.” Now the first part of this might seem obvious. But just think about the second. Encouragement undermines creativity.

Amabile’s research threw up some factors that help you to get into this state during a creative activity:
- the project arouses your curiosity, or stimulates you in some other way
- you get a sense of competence from engaging with the project
- you see the project as being free of strong external control
- the activity gives you a feeling of play rather than work

When you’re expecting to be judged by other people - and I don’t just mean critics, I mean your supporters and your fans and your mentors and your favorite teacher and your perfect approving boss and your ideal generous grant-awarding body - when your work is subject to the approval of others, then you are less likely to be highly creative. This is not what you want to happen.

How does this happen? Here are two ways that the prospect of winning an award, pleasing a boss or satisfying an eager public can prevent you from fully unleashing your creativity:
- they can divert your attention from the actual project as you focus on the reward
- they discourage risk taking.

The kinds of projects that are affected by this, Amabile says, are ones which are heuristic rather than algorithmic - or in my words, when the task involves craft rather than following established procedures exactly. To put this another way, “it may be important for creativity to be able to break out of well-used scripts occasionally, or at least to be able to examine them, instead of proceeding through them uncritically.”

The kind of reward which might not damage your creativity is a reward which is not aimed at controlling you. Some examples:
- a small reward (or if you have very strong internal motivation, that would work too).
- a reward which is more enabling than controlling. That is, a reward which is something interesting or personally challenging. Think of the weekly rewards in The Apprentice on tv - the winning team on each project gets to do exciting stuff that is cool enough to motivate them in spite of their being successful businesspeople with large incomes.
- the reward is more a matter of information about your competence, less a matter of control. For example, you might be turned on by the approval of a leader who actually understands how good you are, but turned off by praise from some pointy-haired Professional Manager. I’m writing as a recovering MBA, and I strongly agree that it’s demotivating to be flattered by someone who has no idea whether you are using your talent to the full or not.
- the reward is one that can make you feel good without controlling your actions: for example it’s an unexpected bonus payment.
- the reward is fair compensation for your great work overall, not for a particular task.
- “the mere presence of others… can impair performance on poorly learned or complex tasks, but enhance performance on well-learned or simple tasks.” In writing terms, this is why we sometimes don’t like to expose our developing ideas to the comments of people who might be able to give advice.

Thinking about all this, it’s not surprising that “discovered problems” are more likely to be solved creatively than are “presented problems.” This was stated by Getzels, an associate of Csikszentmihalyi. People are more likely to work creatively on a project that they chose, not on one that was handed to them.

Amabile has a long list of suggestions to stimulate creativity. These are the ones most relevant to creative writing, I think:
- stress undermines creativity. “Job security appears to be extremely important in fostering creativity in adults.” We know that when people’s jobs are on the line, they tend to play safe, which is uncreative. On the other hand, if your day job is stressful, then I just gave you a reason to move on.
- Creativity heuristics: learn and use ideas for stimulating your creativity (like those cheery lists of wacky ideas for blocked writers)

Personality factors of the successfully creative person, Amabile says, include independence (”an absence of conformity in thinking and dependence on social approval… conformity to social pressure is negatively related to creativity”), sensitivity and a preference for complexity.

But we probably shouldn’t get into the personality factors of the successfully creative person. There are too many of them in too many different lists. And how would the information help you.

Finally, some other interesting social factors that affect creativity:
- financial and conceptual control (freedom to choose the task and the methods)
- the spirit of play (freedom with time and resources)
- your work setting (low surveillance and low expectation of being evaluated)
- individual differences: people respond differently to all these influences.

Did you guess? Teresa Amabile, although she obviously knows a lot about creativity, does not write about writing or about any of the arts. No: she teaches at Harvard Business School. Her ideas must remind business leaders of the “skunk works” concept that Tom Peters made fashionable in the 1980s. They must ring a bell with anyone who read and enjoyed The Soul of a New Machine or who understands Dilbert.

But I’m suggesting to you that her discoveries about creativity have just as much to do with the creative arts as they do with engineering. What do you think?

Source of all this: I loved and hated Amabile’s (and Mary Ann Collins’s, Regina Conti’s, Elise Phillips’s, Martha Picariello’s, John Ruscio’s and Dean Whitney’s) book Creativity in Context when I first read it about a year ago. I loved it because it’s a thorough, research-based survey of an area that I had been thinking of researching. Of course that’s why I hated it, too.

Published on April 25, 2005 at 11:10 pm. Linking to this article? Thank you! The permanent address is http://www.todayiwrite.com/journal/can-intrinsic-motivation-defeat-writers-block.html

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