The Personalities of Creative Writers

Abstract

Popular images of male novelists and poets show them professorially clad, in khakis or in tweed sport coats with leather patches on the arms, smoking pipes; or, as in the image of writers like Ernest Hemingway or Jim Harrison, cradling rifles or fly-fishing, wearing horn-rimmed glasses or swaggering beneath cowboy hats: They are writing from the ivory tower or writing from the field of battle. These two disparate images are, as we shall see, somewhat true. And what about the female writer? She is clad in mannish clothes, her hair cut in a butch, braless and strident, living with her male and female lovers in the Bohemian garrets of a large city; or she is whimsically virginal and intense, her long, tangled and flowing hair entwined with rosettes of wild flowers just picked, sitting in a meadow, her long delicate fingers slowly turning the pages of a leather-bound book with a ribbon for a marker. As we shall see, the personalities these images imply are also somewhat true. Creative people are those who do creative acts. The creativity occurs in the becoming, the making. In the struggle to be creative, personality attributes are extremely important. Creative people seem to have certain core personality attributes. I have made personality attributes the base of my Piirto Piiramid of Talent Development (see Figure 1.1). Many studies have emphasized that successful creators in all domains have certain personality attributes in common (cf. Feist, 1999).