Dilemma of the Day: writing about invention and innovation.

This summer, on the insistence of my dear wife, I am taking several Continuing Studies courses at Stanford, including Writing Today's Mystery Novel taught by Katherine Forest, a popular author and editor. Most of the people in the class are either amateur mystery writers or avid fans of the genre. Actually, everybody in the class is totally into mystery. Except me. I took the course just to expose my mind to something totally different, something completely outside of my field of expertise. So far, I have not been disappointed. There's a lot for us to learn in a mystery writing class.

For example, the last session was about characterization . Katherine explained to us that the reader experiences book through its characters. Development of the main character is the story, so everything that relates to him or her has to be done with care and precision. She said, "What the character does should be inherent in the character."

She is absolutely right. This is exactly what good literature does - it shows us actions of highly believable characters. For instance, when we read or watch a movie about Edison we follow his path from problems to solutions; from a dark lab in Menlo Park, New Jersey, to the proverbial light bulb in his head, to the lights on the streets of the 19th century Manhattan. As readers, we expect and get what we desire: great characters whose actions follow from their personal traits - goodness, badness, complexity, creativity, and etc.

And here lies the problem. By following the character and deriving his achievements from his personal traits, we further strengthen our natural tendency to commit what psychologists call The Fundamental Attribution Error, i.e. overvalue internal personal factors and undervalue external, situational influences. As a result, after reading a good book about a famous inventor like Edison, we are much more likely to think that the success of his inventions is due to his unique personal "inventiveness", rather than important external factors, like the availability of industrial capital, the growing influence of the media, a certain maturity of the underlying technology, and etc. Instead of learning how to analyze and take advantage of major business or technology trends, we are made to believe in "creativity", a unique trait of rare individuals.

Thus, my dilemma: on one hand, to write a interesting book about invention and innovation, I have to populate it with very special, highly believable characters; on the other hand, to expose powerful underlying patterns behind invention and innovation trends, I have to de-emphasize the characters and their personal creativity.