Help me identify an obscure book passage from my past

September 3, 2008 9:42 PM

Many years ago I remember reading a book that included a section on people's creative output, and there were graphs that indicated how old people were (composers, playwrights, etc.) when they produced their major works. The conclusion was something like, there is a limited volume of creative works a person can produce in one lifetime, regardless of when in their life the works were produced. Does this ring any bells?
posted by Dr. Send to Society & Culture (5 answers total)

Best answer: Was it Richard Rhodes, How to Write?

There's a section in that book that sounds like what you describe.
posted by jayder at 10:02 PM on September 3, 2008

Is it related to Hayes' assertion that expertise takes 10 years, based on major works by composers, including Mozart? I took his class at Carnegie Mellon, so that popped right back into memory.
posted by ALongDecember at 10:35 PM on September 3, 2008

"Kurt Vonnegut gives writers twenty years of prime, and it's dismayingly hard to think of exceptions. Whether they start the meter late, like Shaw or Conrad, or early, like Fitzgerald, or even stop it in the middle, like Tolstoy, it runs for about the same twenty years. Which means that one's prime is not a function purely of age but of some finite source of energy inherent in the profession itself."
-Wilfrid Sheed, "The Twenty-Year Itch"

While I've read pretty much all of Vonnegut and don't remember him addressing this topic, it could be a direction to look in - he did sometimes illustrate things with graphs.
posted by Daily Alice at 5:13 AM on September 4, 2008

I've heard that as well- my theory is that one has a limited amount of brain capacity for "creative snippets". Those little ideas that one has like "it would be awesome to have a character that has a pet tiger" and "write about a guy who restores old Fords".

So, you write the first couple of creative works and you sort of exhaust your supply. Now you have to develop a way to redevelop and remember new ones. Some people are good at this- Larry David, for example, carries a notebook and writes down everything that could possibly be funny. And other people just can't make it work, and their creativity has run out...
posted by gjc at 7:01 AM on September 4, 2008

Response by poster: Yes! It was Richard Rhodes. I've spent hours flipping through my books trying to find that passage, but it never occurred to me that it was Richard Rhodes even though that book's been sitting on my shelf for the whole time.

Thank you!
posted by Dr. Send at 1:16 PM on September 4, 2008