How creativity can be found in looking sideways at your goal

There is a tendency among how-to enthusiasts to talk about creativity as if it had fixed objectives: things you know from the start will turn out to be novels, symphonies or paintings. Writers and musicians who have suffered the uncertainties of creation know that this is an unlikely prospectus. If they have to talk about it at all, they cite “artistic vision” and leave it at that.

I think both these approaches are inadequate. Experience tells me that creativity often lies to one side of a declared aim, and “artistic vision” is a redundant metaphor, because what we are considering…