Creative studies benefit in numerous ways from biographical and autobiographical accounts. The benefits may be especially obvious in studies of writers, given that the evidence is often quite explicit and well articulated. After all, writers are experts at self-expression. Assuming that the biographical or autobiographical account is itself written or is in some way linguistic, it is likely that the data provided by writers are more informative than, say, those provided by a dancer or painter who writes about his or her life. Rothenberg's (1990) account of the novelist John Cheever comes to mind, as does Albert (1996) on the Brontes; Ippolito and Tweney (2003) on Virginia Wolfe; Henrickson (2003) on Mark Twain; and my own modest work on Sylvia Plath (1998).

Certainly there are methodological concerns with all biographical studies. They do not provide the same kind of data as experimental and controlled studies and are open to various biases that can undermine internal validity. Still, they provide useful illustrations and suggest hypotheses that can later be tested in a more controlled fashion. Additionally, biographical studies retain a realistic level of analysis. There is little reductionism, for example, just to name one experimental problem that is largely avoided by biographical studies (Runco & Okuda, 1993). The level of analysis in biographical studies is the creative individual rather than one particular personality trait, one particular cognitive process, or one particular psychological or social need. Experimental studies provide reliable data, but their advantage – experimental control – is also their disadvantage.