The Psychology of Creative Writing, Edited by Scott Barry Kaufman & James C. Kaufman

The Psychology of Creative Writing takes a scholarly, psychological look at multiple aspects of creative writing, including the creative writer as a person, the text itself, the creative process, the writer's development, the link between creative writing and mental illness, the personality traits of comedy and screen writers, and how to teach creative writing.

For many years, writing skills were treated as the ugly stepsister of reading skills. Tests of “verbal aptitude” and “verbal ability” comprised assessments of vocabulary, reading comprehension, and verbal reasoning. Writing was nowhere to be found. Even achievement tests of “English composition” created by the College Board often had no actual writing whatsoever. Although Louis Thurstone distinguished between verbal comprehension and verbal fluency in his early theory of primary mental abilities, the former has been widely measured, the latter only rarely. And when the latter was measured, it was typically by tests requiring writing at a basic level, such as writing down as many words beginning with a certain letter as an examinee could think of in a specific time period.

Title: The Psychology of Creative Writing

Editors: Scott Barry Kaufman (Yale University) & James C. Kaufman (California State University)

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Year: 2009

ISBN (eBook): 978-0-511-59538-7