I’ve recently been reading books and articles about creative success and I started thinking about two principles of creativity I’ve heard reiterated frequently: (1) creators are often bad at predicting which of their works will be the most successful, and (2) they usually have lots of works that aren’t as widely acclaimed before their first big hit.
After I started generalizing these rules in my head I naturally began to think of outliers to prove them and myself wrong. I thought of Andy Weir’s “The Martian,” his debut novel which not only became a motion-picture featuring Matt Damon, but also earned him recognition and privileges from important people at NASA. This was his first novel, and he had experienced tremendous success, so here was the outlier to these rules. Or so I thought.
As I thought about the situation more, I realized it wasn’t too derivative from what I had said earlier. The first criteria checks out perfectly: Weir didn’t expect at all for the book to become the massive success it did. The second one seems difficult to counter, because this was his first novel. But it certainly wasn’t his first bit of writing. Weir kept a blog with an active reader base for a while before he began work on the novel. And he actually published his novel on his blog, chapter by chapter. He received feedback from his readers and made several big changes to the book based on his readers’ feedback. Even though the novel was perhaps his first formal and complete work, he had written many other things before it.
It doesn’t fit the model to a T, but a fit exists. I also will go back later and cite these sources…I’m just tired right now.
THERE YOU GO.
