Narrative Creativity
An Introduction to How and Why

This Element provides new creativity theory, explains why children are more imaginative than AI, and outlines methods to enhance creativity.

Angus Fletcher (Author), Mike Benveniste (Author)

9781009614788, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 30 January 2025

92 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 0.6 cm, 0.271 kg

Narrative creativity is a new, neuroscience-based approach to innovation, problem solving, and resilience that has proved effective in business executives, scientists, engineers, doctors, and students as young as eight. This Element offers a concise introduction to narrative creativity's theory and practice. It distinguishes narrative creativity from ideation, divergent thinking, design thinking, brainstorming, and other current approaches to cultivating creativity. It traces the biological origins of narrative creativity and explains why narrative creativity will always be mechanically impossible for computer artificial intelligences. It provides practical exercises, developed and tested in hundreds of classrooms and businesses, and validated independently by the US Army, for improving narrative creativity. It explains how narrative creativity contributes to technological innovation, scientific progress, cultural growth, and psychological well-being, and it describes how narrative creativity can be assessed. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

1. Why read this element?
2. Current creativity training
3. What current creativity training misses
4. Narrative's role in creativity
5. Narrative creativity training, the prehistory
6. Narrative creativity training, a new theory
7. Narrative creativity training, basic practices
8. Narrative creativity training for students
9. Narrative creativity training for working professionals
10. Narrative creativity and human intelligence
11. Advanced practices for the future
Coda: Distinguishing logic from narrative
Appendix: Assessing narrative creativity
References.

Subject Areas: Psychology [JM]