The Myth Of The Lone Genius

In his book GROUP GENIUS, psychologist Keith Sawyer challenges the idea that creativity is a solitary pursuit.  Sawyer writes that “most of what we’ve heard about famous inventions is wrong because it’s based on the myth of the lone genius.”  Writes Sawyer:“The more I observed creativity in action the more I realized that the most radical breakthroughs – including television, the airplane, e-mail and even the board game Monopoly – emerged from collaborative webs that can’t be contained within any one company’s walls.”A collaborative web is a diffuse and informal network of people dedicated to the same tasks.  For example, playwrights can form a collaborative web.  Each time one playwright presents his or her work, other playwrights see that work.  The viewing playwrights may be inspired by the work they have seen, which inspiration then affects the way the viewing playwrights develop their own works.  As each playwright, in turn, presents his or her works to the play righting community, the entire community develops and moves forward, incorporating new inspiration along the way.Seen this way, playwriting is no longer a solitary pursuit.  Instead, it is a group activity.  Before any individual playwright can create, that playwright needs to be inspired by the work of others.It is extremely important in the theatre development process that playwrights, bookwriters, lyricists and composers recognize  the collaborative nature of the process and abandon the myth of the lone genius.  It has been my experience that the single most important factor in the development of new works of theatre is a willingness to collaborate.  Writers who view their work as something they alone can comprehend, comment on or change – writers who view themselves as lone geniuses – resist suggestions from directors and producers.  To such lone wolfs, incorporating the ideas of others is tantamount to diluting their own vision, their own voice.  The truth is, however, that welcoming input from others makes available to the writer new sources of inspiration, new opportunities for genius to emerge.I don’t mean to suggest that writers are the only people in the theatre development process who need to collaborate and abandon the myth of the lone genius.  Certainly, there are a great number of directors and producers who insist on pursuing their own vision and will brook no resistance or interference from others — and most would be better directors and producers if they were more collaborative.  In my experience, however, it is writers who most frequently fall victim to the myth of the lone genius by nature of the writing process, which in most cases involves a great deal of solitary work.