Writers Magazine

The Creative Process

We came close to inventing a quantum theory of creativity during a poetry reading by Professor Philip Gross of Glamorgan University at Kellogg College, Oxford. Rather like Schrodinger’s cat, the debate that followed suggested how the creative process was changed, if not actually killed off, when it is examined. Does the keeping of notebooks, for example, change the quality of the creative impulse that the words try to capture?

The title of this discussion was ‘Attention and Intention (and the tensions in between)’. It unpicked some thought-provoking threads that link the space between creative writers and imaginative readers. The thread that I followed led me to wonder if creative writing could be categorised as either ‘you come to me’ or ‘I go out to you’.

Poets paint their picture with words and you, the reader, have to go into their minds if you are to grasp the image and apprehend the writer’s emotion. This approach might also describe the literary genre of fiction, where the reader has to contribute to the process and provide the emotional landscape for the narrative.

Quantum mechanics would certainly recognise this as a situation where Heisenberg’s ‘Uncertainly Principle’ from quantum mechanics can be applied to creative writing. A physicist knows that you cannot provide a perfect description of a particle since it has certain properties when it is in motion that vanish when it is arrested. Many quantum phenomena change or actually vanish if they are observed.

The poet probably recognises that the creative thoughts, expressed as static words and placed on paper, are not the same as the thoughts that will be generated in the mind of the reader. So how much does a close examination alter the essence of what is being examined?

So the big ‘quantum’ question for the creative person is, should they try to minimise the uncertainty of their intention by entering the mind of the reader? But if they reconfigure the words to try and ‘match the mind’ of their reader, then the creative process is changed.

This little ‘thought experiment’, beloved by theoretical physicists, provides an insight into the creative challenge confronting poets.