Creative writing is a multifaceted endeavor requiring verbal skills, extensive content knowledge, and the motivation to persist in spite of obstacles. In this chapter we focus particularly on creative writing in the form of science fiction and fantasy. We begin with a presentation of a particular view of creativity, namely the creative cognition approach that emphasizes knowledge and how it is used. We then consider ways in which access to that knowledge can, on the negative side, limit and, on the positive side, guide the originality and believability of new stories that authors generate. Along the way, we also make suggestions about ways in which novice and experienced writers can produce texts that are more engaging as well as informative and compelling.

CREATIVE COGNITION

Creative cognition is an approach to understanding and fostering creativity that focuses on fundamental cognitive processes, such as retrieval, conceptual combination, and analogical mapping, and on the conceptual structures on which those processes operate to yield novel and appropriate ideas (Finke, Ward, & Smith, 1992; Ward, Smith, & Finke, 1999). Its goal is to provide a rich theoretical account of the factors that underlie the production of new thoughts; that is, the mental representations that are the raw materials of creativity in all its forms, ranging from the most mundane to the most exalted.

The creative cognition approach recognizes that conceptual structures are developed and that cognitive processes operate within a broader context of individual differences, developmental trends, and environmental influences, among other factors.

Humans come into the world with a problem: how to interpret what is going on out there and in here. Of course, unless they have a disorder (for example, autism), they seem to handle the situation quite well. They learn very quickly about the ordinary kinds of things that there are in the world. They also learn about the properties of things. And they seem to acquire linguistic skills effortlessly. They even read minds: the curl of the lip, the raised eyebrow, the look of scorn, the eyes sparkling with joy. They also see faces in the clouds, meaning in the drop of a glove, and God in the eye of the storm. Cognitive science has spent the last five decades theorizing about the processes that lead to the acquisition of such knowledge. With the aid of cognitive scientists' clever experiments we now seem to know at least a little bit more about intuitive physics, intuitive biology, intuitive psychology, and intuitive quantification. My interest lies in the areas of the structure and acquisition of religious knowledge as this relates to such intuitive systems. I am particularly concerned about peoples' intuitive knowledge of agents and their actions and how this form of cognition undergirds religious concepts about culturally postulated superhuman agents.

My point would be that the process that leads to the development of religious ideas is the same process that leads to the development of ordinary ideas with minimal “tweaking” that makes it possible for us to distinguish the former from the latter.

Chapter overview

In this chapter we shall argue for advantages of the ritual form hypothesis over the ritual frequency hypothesis. We shall take up a wide array of considerations bearing on the two hypotheses' merits. These considerations are of two broad sorts concerning theoretical and empirical matters. We shall address theoretical and conceptual matters first in the next section, since they will help to set the stage for a fair evaluation in the remaining sections of the hypotheses' empirical predictions.

In the first section we shall defend the greater theoretical depth of the ritual form hypothesis. The argument we make in its behalf has two parts. First, we shall take up some persistent conceptual problems with the ritual frequency hypothesis. We shall argue that precisely the kinds of theoretical distinctions that the ritual form hypothesis makes are necessary to remedy these ambiguities. Second, we will show that the ritual form hypothesis isolates a more fundamental cognitive variable than either the ritual frequency hypothesis or Whitehouse's larger theory of religious modes, since ritual form is a conspicuous factor – probably the principal factor – influencing the unexplained, independent variable of the frequency hypothesis, viz., rituals' performance frequencies.

In the remainder of the chapter we turn to the hypotheses' comparative predictive and explanatory strengths with regard to the empirical facts. On pages 139–146 we shall contend that both Whitehouse's general theory and the ritual frequency hypothesis are less well equipped than our theory of ritual competence and the ritual form hypothesis to handle the explanatory problems we mentioned in the previous chapter concerning the uniformity of Whitehouse's doctrinal and imagistic modes.

Whitehouse's ethnography

In October of 1987 Harvey Whitehouse entered the village of Dadul in the Eastern Province of New Britain Island in Papua New Guinea to begin his fieldwork among the Mali Baining. Unbeknownst to him then, his arrival was one of the catalysts for a series of events that made not only for considerable excitement in the area over the next eighteen months but also for an ethnography (Whitehouse, 1995) that is as theoretically fertile as it is dramatic. Inevitably, the short summary which follows will capture little, if any, of the drama, but it will point to some of these materials' theoretically suggestive aspects.

New Britain Island lies off the eastern coast of Papua New Guinea. The Mali are one of five subgroups of the Baining people, who occupy the rural regions of the Gazelle Peninsula, which constitutes the northern half of the island's Eastern Province. A different ethnic group, the Tolai, occupies the more developed northeastern corner of the Gazelle Peninsula. A third ethnic group, the Pomio, inhabit most of the southern half of the province. Comparatively speaking, the Tolai, unlike the Baining and the Pomio, have prospered from contacts with the industrialized world.

From the late nineteenth century until the end of World War I the area was under German administration. Exclusive of the traumatic Japanese occupation during World War II, from 1919 until independence in 1975, Australia administered the region.

The cognitive foundations of cultural transmission

We shall explore insights our theory of religious ritual competence provides about aspects of religious ritual performance and their psychological foundations, addressing the complex relationships between religious ritual form, performance frequency, memory, motivation, and emotional arousal as well as the sensory pageantry in rituals that evoke it. In this chapter we focus primarily on questions of memory and its connections with performance frequency and emotional arousal.

These connections are vital to understanding the process of transmitting religious knowledge across generations. It is particularly easy to see why research on human memory may illuminate such matters when considering how non-literate societies transmit religious knowledge. The critical point here is not about the problems of transmitting religious knowledge in the absence of books and printing. It is not even about the problems of transmitting religious knowledge in circumstances in which the huge majority of participants are illiterate. The point is rather about the problems of transmitting religious knowledge when the only lasting public representations are iconic items such as skulls, skins, and sculptures, i.e., when the only lasting public representations are non-linguistic. Non-literate cultures bring these issues into high relief, but ultimately, even in literate cultures the transmission of rituals often rests not on consulting texts but on participants' memories of their ritual actions.

When non-linguistic public representations play such a central role in the transmission of cultural knowledge, questions about the faithful replication of that knowledge inevitably arise.

Slightly more than a decade ago we published a book, Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture, in which we launched the cognitive science of religion. For all of the froth that accompanies encounters between the humanities and the cognitive sciences on university campuses, everyone knows that the best work in each area regularly looks to the other for inspiration and correction. Our goal is not to supplant traditional work in religious studies but to supplement it. If our work seems tilted too far toward the scientific, it is only because we aim to redress an imbalance -an imbalance in strategy and approach that favors the particular over the general, the idiosyncratic over the systematic, and the interpretive over the explanatory (as if we could make sense of either item in each pair in isolation from the other). What we are out to do is to help bring an end to the defensive pronouncements of humanists and, especially, of scholars of religion concerning what the sciences can never address productively. Who knows what the sciences can or cannot address productively? Only time and a great deal of hard work will tell.

We should emphasize that this aspiration is not born of any undue confidence about the truth of the proposals we advance. (What we take up are, after all, empirical matters.) What should be most striking are the tremendous difficulties connected with even articulating testable theories in these domains, let alone testing them.