March 15th, 2026

Elements of creativity

I can’t quite decide. Is it novel familiarity, or, is it familiar novelty? Whatever it is, it’s not enough. 
    Oh, I’m trying to define the creative process. 
    When I’m creating a piece of music for the coffeeshop I fear ending up with someone else’s riff, slipping it into my song unawares, mistakenly claiming it as my own. But when I try too hard to create a truly original riff, one that sounds like nothing anyone else would ever have created, I fear it’ll be unlistenable, just too weird. 
    The trick is to do something different but to do so within the range of what my listeners will find acceptable, sufficiently like other songs but not the same. When I find the fine line between familiarity and novelty, my listener can hum along because the song has sufficient predictability but also have their ear captured by something that feels new and interesting.
    But there’s another element to this creative process. There also needs to be a sense of presence, the person of the musician connecting with the person of the listener. I love the coffeeshop where I’m at eye level with my listeners. In playing there, I strive to be present with the music I’ve composed, channeling the balance of familiarity and novelty created within it. When I’m able to do so, the sense of presence expands to include the listener who has been captured by the music and is listening intentionally. I can see it, their presence with mine connected by the music I’m playing.


When writing a piece of fiction I also tread that fine line between familiarity and novelty.
    The characters need to remind the reader of someone they knew, not quite old Uncle Chester, but close. However to be interesting, a story needs something to happen that you didn’t really expect would happen. And when you reflect on it, that particular something could very well have happened. It hasn’t in your own life, but it’s all rather interesting that it did in the story.
    However, there’s another element to fiction creation alongside of familiarity and novelty. The reader also needs a sense of presence with the main character, to relate to the subjective experience the character has in moving through the elements of the plot. The reader needs to feel inside what the character is feeling on the page. 
    There are writerly ways to create presence. For example, I can play with verb tense and the narrator’s voice. However, what works best is when my characters are real within my mind, speaking their own words and reacting in their own ways to plot circumstances. I need to feel a presence with them for them to create a sense of presence with the reader. 


Working as a psychologist I experienced the therapy room as a creative place with those same three elements.     
    Oh, there was familiarity, often lots of it. The tale of someone disrupting the safety and satisfaction of life was a familiar theme with many clients. Of course, it also had that familiar feeling for the client, as they had talked about it to others before coming to therapy.
    If I was thoughtful enough, novelty could be introduced. Often it was a slightly different rendering of the events and their meanings, one that opened up new possibilities of perspective and interpersonal options. In the business we called that novelty a reframing.
    Mental health therapists rooted in the psychiatric approach use the reframe of turning suffering and functional difficulties into symptoms, aggregating those symptoms into a disorder. Once the diagnostic label is decided, standard treatment approaches can be applied.
    For many people receiving a diagnosis is confirming and the various intervention procedures helpful. Sometimes however this dance of familiarity and novelty falls short. The professional may make the correct diagnosis and enact the best treatment but the whole process keeps repeating with declining benefit. Professional and patient can get stuck in a dance of let’s-try-this-if-that-isn’t-working.
    So, let’s bring in that third element in the creative process, presence. 
    In addition to the smarts and skills of the psychotherapist there’s another something in the room: two human beings uniting together in feeling the feeling and linking thought processes to find a better way. 
    Late in my career, a branch of psychology with the unwieldy name “interpersonal neurobiology” gave scientific credence to the process of the linking up of minds (Spock had done so in Star Trek episodes years before). Neural networks are present in our brains, ready to connect us to the neural networks in other people’s brains. From the therapist’s chair I felt the suffering of my client, not just empathized with it. Often that feeling was intensely visceral. And when it came to the client finding more functional ways of living, it was the creative process of our rethinking together, both of our minds working in sync. We found workable options and client suffering eased. It made the therapy room both magical and real. 
    Presence. 


And now in the early 21st Century we take creativity into a new age, that of Artificial Intelligence. 
    The expectation of the AI revolution is that digital algorithms will find the perfect balances of familiarity and novelty for whatever human endeavour it chooses to emulate. Consider all those eye-catching vids and pix flooding onto your social media feeds. They seem really creative, don’t they?
    Should we anticipate the time when an AI author can generate the right number of suspects and red herrings to write an intriguing mystery novel? Maybe it’s already here. Switching genre that same AI author could put potential lovers through the perfect combination of relationship and circumstantial spasms to create the bodice-ripper of a romance. 
    And musically? Digitally modelled, algorithm created music is probably already flowing into our elevators and movie backtracks. 
    And what about human problem solving and stress relief? AI Chatbot companions convincingly make empathetic statements, perspective agreements and behavioural suggestions to keep us hooked into their apps.
    
But none of that fully creates. Creation requires the third element: presence, that something uniquely human. It’s what our brains are built to look for. It’s what satisfies.