Various researchers have documented the creative individual's preference for complexity and asymmetry and his independence in judgment (1, 2, 3 ) . Consequently, it was hypothesized that adolescents choosing to write about a disorganized stimulus will demonstrate more over-all verbal originality and greater independence from an assigned stimulus, by making both common and atypical phenomena original. On the other hand, adolescents choosing to write about an organized stimulus will demonstrate differential originality in response to an assigned organized or disorganized stimulus. The 112 Ss were the entire eighth grade class of a rural Iowa public school who were present on the day of the experiment. The 56 boys and 56 girls were between 13 and 14 yr. old. Ss were ind~vidually asked to choose between a pair of stimuli including one organized and one d~sorgaruzed drawing. As a group, Ss were then randomly assigned an organized or disorgan~~ed sumulus from a different set of drawings and given 15 min. to write a story about it. The drawings within each set were similar in color, detail, and objects. All were drawn by the same artist in the same style. However, the disorganized drawing differed from its pair by the scattered (but artistic) arrangement of the same objects. The stimuli were similar to but more complex than those used by May and Tabachnick ( 4 ) . Three judges blind coded each story as original or non-original, using the general descriptions of Yamamoto and Torrance ( 5 ) . e.g., an original story might be picturesque or vivid in style or contain unusual or surprising plots and/or themes. The average correlation of the inter-judge reliabilities of .52 was significant. Stories were categorized as original or non-original if two or more judges agreed. The judges also evaluated writing style as either exposition, description, simple or complex narration. The results supported the hypotheses. Ss who had initially chosen the disorganized stimulus wrote significantly more original stories than S's who had chosen the organized stimulus (x2 = 4.42, df = 1, p < .05). The originality of these two groups, Ss having chosen the organized stimulus versus Ss having chosen the disorganized stimulus, was separately,analyzed with respect to the assigned stimulus. Only the verbal originality of Ss initially choosing the organized stimulus was significantly affected by the assigned stimulus ( x a = 4.13, d f = 1, p < .05). , G a t is, among these Ss those receiving the disorganized stimulus demonstrated more orlg~nality than those receiving the organized stimulus. Their level of originality approached that of Ss initially choosing the disorganized stimulus. Complex narration was somewhat more likely to be written by a female ( x 2 = 10.60, d f = 3, p < .05) and to be evaluated as original than was exposition, description, or simple narration ( x 2 = 11.34, df = 3 , p < .O5). However, sex was not related to originality.