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Updated July 24, 2024You’re reading an excerpt of Creative Doing, by Herbert Lui. 75 practical techniques to unlock creative potential in your work, hobby, or next career. Purchase now for instant, lifetime access to the book.
A schoolteacher writes the first three pages of a short story on a typewriter. When he’s done, he’s disgusted with it. It was getting too long, he didn’t know how to market it, he didn’t like the character, he couldn’t relate to the story, the list goes on… He throws it out.
His wife finds the pages in the trash. She likes what she’s seeing, and says he should go along with it.
He takes her advice. He had wanted to sell it to a magazine for a $2,000 fee, but he knew this story would need more space. He decides to make it a novel. He sends it to a publisher and he forgets about it.
That’s the story of Carrie, the novel that would launch Stephen King’s career. Brian De Palma would direct a film based on it, and people around the world would buy millions of copies.
Tabitha didn’t just save Stephen from throwing out the draft; she encouraged and advised him throughout the creative process. But even she wouldn’t have had anything to respond to if he didn’t write something to throw out in the first place.
Science for me is very close to art. … Scientific discovery is an irrational act. It’s an intuition which turns out to be reality at the end of it—and I see no difference between a scientist developing a marvelous discovery and an artist making a painting.Carlo Rubbia*
In 2014, while she was working at Google, Sarah Cooper found an old note. Years earlier, she had seen a colleague make a strong impression in a meeting with a completely nonsensical Venn diagram. She wrote down “How to look smart in a meeting,” with a note to herself to draw Venn diagrams. She added another nine parodical observations, and published her first post on Medium. She said, “It was just really—to use the cliché, it was low-hanging fruit for me to be able to finish it, especially since I was in a ton of meetings at the time anyway.”
Cooper eventually migrated these blog posts to her own parody blog, titled The Cooper Review. A year prior, she’d started a parody of Cosmopolitan, called oolalove!, and made videos on YouTube. She illustrated by tracing photos she took of her friends. She made a calendar. For a short while, she even made memes. Millions of people read her work at Medium and The Cooper Review, leading her to a three-book deal.