Thursday 22 October 2015

Does money damage creativity? - by Nicola Morgan

No, I didn't mean that headline to be clickbait for publishers looking for reasons not to pay authors. Although there's a motivation theory which suggests that might be no bad thing.

I sense shudders of fear going through the ranks of writers reading this. You're thinking, "She's lost it! The woman who is known for fighting for the right to be paid decently is now suggesting we'd all be better writing for nothing. Call the white coats! Someone shut her up, NOW!"

I want to talk about motivation, or drive. Drive is the title of Daniel H Pink's excellent book, which draws on shedloads of research into the psychology of motivation. It's essential reading for every employer, teacher, manager, team leader, parent. It's a brilliantly structured book, too, and NOT one those those books which is really a magazine article tediously stretched into book form by the injudicious inclusion of eleventy million examples to prove one point. Drive takes you through the various motivational operating systems, from Motivation 1.0 - the need to survive; Motivation 2.0 - reward and punishment, a system espoused by the behaviourists and ruling our world until recently; and Motivation 3.0 - which differentiates extrinsic (eg money) and intrinsic (eg satisfaction and pride) rewards and recognises the risks and weaknesses of Motivation 2.0.

For routine, linear tasks, extrinsic motivation (money, prizes or other specific rewards) works. For creative, lateral tasks where you are looking for solutions to problems, generating ideas or creating something new, those rewards don't work so well, or sometimes at all. What we need then is "intrinsic motivation", the sense of achievement, improvement, mastery, that feeling you get when you succeed at something difficult and the reward is the sense of success more than the physical trappings of it.

Let me give you one fascinating and provocative example, which is supremely relevant to writers and goes straight to the title of this post.

Teresa Amabile, Harvard Business School professor, is a well known researcher into creativity and has done many studies into creative motivation. In one study, she and colleagues got 23 professional artists and asked them to select ten of their commissioned pieces and ten of their non-commissioned pieces. The pieces were given to a panel of art experts, who did not know what the study was about (nor did the artists), and asked them to "rate the pieces on creativity and technical skill." The researchers reported, "Our results were startling. [...] The commissioned works were rated as significantly less creative than the non-commissioned works, yet they were not rated as different in technical quality. Moreover, the artists reported feeling significantly more constrained when doing commissioned works than when doing non-commissioned works."

Now, although this is interesting, there are obvious aspects which aren't surprising at all. Commissions may naturally tend to be more constrained and less motivational. After all, it's someone else's vision you're having to work to. The task has been set by someone else and the artist is being told to be creative, and being told to be creative could be a dampener even for a creative person who presumably loves being creative.

But it's worth thinking about. What happens inside us, to our motivation, when the task has been set for us by someone and we are working to their deadline and parameters? Surely we do lose some kind of ownership of it and thus at least some of the motivation to excel? You'd think that being chosen for a project and being paid for it would be highly motivating. And, sure, those moments when you get the invitation and the go-ahead (and later the payment) are positive and uplifting. But maybe not so motivating. Maybe not so conducive to doing our best, most original work.

You'd think, too, that the desire to please the person who gave you the commission would be motivating, because their praise will be your incentive. But the Motivation 3.0 theory of drive, and all the research behind it, gives plenty of examples of payment, pressure and goal-orientation being detrimental to creative achievement.

So, I'm asking you: a commission may be comforting (and, of course, everyone needs enough money to pay bills - Motivation 3.0 absolutely accepts that) but is it possible that you might do your most creative work uncommissioned?

Or, more precisely, and this is a slightly different question and a more challenging one: could the fact that you've been commissioned, and that you therefore know exactly what your goal is, be getting in the way of your creative potential?

Thoughts, please! But I'm not paying you: your reward is intrinsic...

www.nicolamorgan.com



9 comments:

Lari Don said...

Fascinating blog post, about a book I must read... I wonder if the question could be framed differently however. Not does money damage creativity, but do rules, boundaries and expectations damage creativity? A commissioned work of art (eg a novel with a contract, an editor and a deadline) has already been defined. It may have a title, a first line, a synopsis. A lot of possibilities have therefore already been closed down. However, a novel that a writer is writing on spec only has the writer’s hopes and vision, so it has the potential to go in any direction at all. I’ve written novels that I’ve already discussed with editors, and I’ve written novels that no one knew I was writing until I finished. I think, honestly, that the latter books are my best work. (Not by much though. I’m entirely happy with the commissioned ones as well!) I also think the non-commissioned books are possibly a bit weirder... Having said that, I’ve ground to a painful halt writing a couple of ‘on spec’ books because I couldn’t see a way forward, and also, possibly, because I hadn’t promised them to anyone. I’ve never done that with a book an editor was already expecting... Your blog raises so many fascinating thoughts! For example, I think school children don’t get the chance often enough to write with no rules or boundaries or expectations at all. Whenever I’m involved in setting creative writing tasks for kids, I try to dissuade the teachers etc from saying – your story must be about this theme, or start with this line... I like to give kids the rare chance to write whatever they like, with no rules at all. (Though I know some children and writers find that freedom scary!) I believe we all need the chance to create without any boundaries or expectations at all. Sometimes.

Lari Don said...

(apologies for ridiculously long comment above! Your blog obviously fired my brain up past my ability to either edit myself or to know when to shut up, first thing this morning...)

Nicola Morgan said...

Don't apologise - I'm glad you're so interested!

Re the money question, yes: the title of the post used money as a shorthand for "extrinsic motivation" but really it's about the whole concept of a commission, including the things you mention.

Re creative writing in schools: I couldn't agree more. Although I had an exceptionally traditional education, with all the writing rules/punctuation etc etc, I remember vividly that when we had a writing task, it was almost always simply a word or phrase and the instruction to write about it in any way we wanted. So, the title might be "Fog" and we could write a poem or story or description or absolutely anything at all. So I found that my instinctive response, internally, was to say "how can I do this differently from everyone else." And it's how I came to love writing, because it was free expression.

Katherine Langrish said...

'Free expression' - a phrase which, this morning, has given me a sudden sense of relief and release. Thanks, Nicola.

CL Taylor said...

That would explain why the books that I write out of contract are so much easier to write!

Nicola Morgan said...

Yes! And why I'm struggling to get started on the one I have a much-wanted contract for...

Lynne Benton said...

Great post, Nicola, and very thought-provoking! I think, however, it depends on the sort of books you write. I write a lot of very short books for Early Readers, and I often find that when my editor emails me out of the blue to say "We need an 80 word story (about anything you like!) in three weeks time" it concentrates the mind wonderfully, and although I'd had no ideas in my head before hand I find my imagination leaps to fill those three weeks, and I always manage to come up with two or three totally new stories. Several of these "instant" stories have subsequently been published, so the short deadline, boundaries and expectations have a good effect, at least on me. But with a longer novel I entirely agree that the more freedom you have to write your own story in your own way, the better.
Thank you for such a fascinating post!

Katherine Roberts said...

No. Lack of money damages creativity!

Nicola Morgan said...

Katherine, as I said in the post, and as Motivation 3.0 explicitly acknowledges, the first needs of money, food and shelter are crucial. The motivation 3.0 theory I'm discussing explicitly applies *after* you have sufficient of everything else to survive. Of course, lack of sufficient money damages creativity, for a whole load of very understandable aspects of psychology, such as preoccupation and scarcity. That's not in doubt and is not denied by the post! Far from it. I do recommend the book.