This chapter discusses the elusive meaning of ‘inspiration’, and considers what it might feel like, the situations where it might occur, and how to harness and understand it when it does. It finally explores the idea of ‘happy accidents’ and thinks about the relationship between habit and practice as active methods of inspiration in contrast to the more passive Romantic notion of divine intervention.

This brief introduction outlines some of the things that composers might do when they compose, examining how the way composers and think and work is tangled together with the conditions and procedures surrounding the, and how they work.

This chapter explores the tensions produced by Vaughan Williams’s desire to make a significant contribution to English cultural life as a leading composer while also not discussing his compositions in any detail in a public forum. Vaughan Williams conceived a path for himself as a musical activist, leading practical amateur music-making, while creating new works that reflected his community. Yet the experience of his first large-scale premiere, A Sea Symphony, at the Leeds Musical Festival in 1910, revealed that public attention, while necessary, could also be discomforting.

In private, Vaughan Williams was more relaxed: he was the centre of attention at parties and enjoyed the company of younger women, with whom he sometimes flirted under the nickname of ‘Uncle Ralph’. He was also deeply committed to his composition pupils, supporting them in ways that went far beyond any contractual responsibility, and often enjoyed working with conductors preparing his new works. Yet public scrutiny was always a source of anxiety, even in his final years. Coping strategies, including avoidance and deflection, enabled Vaughan Williams to navigate the public demands of his role while focusing on the process of composition.

This chapter is devoted to Ishiguro’s archive and aims to suggest ways in which our understanding of the author’s work can be developed and enhanced by an examination of his drafts, notes, plans and other documents. It first offers a brief description of the scope and contents of Ishiguro’s papers, which the author carefully selected, organized, and prepared before their transfer to the Harry Ransom Center. It then discusses his conscientious methods of composition as revealed by the archives and as presented by Ishiguro himself in an explanatory piece entitled ‘How I Write’: months or years of planning precede the first formal drafts, which are extensively revised or sometimes discarded altogether. As a case study, the chapter examines some of the ‘precursors’ to The Remains of the Day in order to show how access to the archives and preliminary steps to a published text may illuminate the complex process of creation.

In the introductory chapter to the Cambridge Handbook of Creativity and Emotion, we define basic terms in the study of creativity and emotions. We argue about the need for specification of different aspects of creativity under investigation and caution scholars to make conclusions about specific aspects studied, rather than “creativity” in general. This Handbook examined three groups of affective processes: affective states (relatively short-lasting reactions to internal or external stimuli), emotion-related traits (typical ways of feeling), and emotion abilities (capacities to reason about and with emotions, such as in the case of emotional intelligence). Next, we describe the organization of this Handbook into five parts, each addressing a different aspect in the study of creativity, including methodological issues, creative process, creative person, creative product, and creative contexts (school and work). The concluding chapter presents an integrative model of the role of affective processes across aspects of creativity.

This chapter examines the role of emotion traits in creativity. Here, creativity is defined as a syndrome that involves attitudinal, cognitive, and behavioral components. Emotion traits most centrally affect aspects of the creativity syndrome that are manifested across situations and time. Specifically, the chapter reviews evidence of emotion traits influencing the creative decision, creative process engagement, domain-specific performance, and frequency of creative activities and achievement. The function of emotion traits is to direct attention, energize, and lower the threshold for behavior. The chapter suggests future directions in the study of emotion traits and creativity.

Pears was innately skilled at the creation of new song works, making him the ideal collaborator for composers and clearly an inspirational artist for whom to write. Yet there was something more. With Pears there was the concomitant presence of all of the particles inherent to the creative process. He was a prolific reader and therefore the ideal text interpreter, with an extensive range of colours and dynamics that were technically available in his voice paired with his seemingly boundless artistic instincts. This tenor’s voice was not universally admired. Yet Pears’s recordings of Britten set the gold standard against which all successive generations of Britten interpreters would need to measure up – defining if not implying an authoritative version for phrasing, dynamics, vocal colours, textual inflection, and tempi, at the very least. This chapter explores the first performances of Pears’s association with dozens of living composers, works for unaccompanied tenor, and combinations of tenor and piano, guitar, harp, and chamber orchestra. The chapter concludes with a table of all of the tenor’s premieres.

The invention of imaginary worlds may be understood as a powerful tool for exploring experience, discovering the self, and creating knowledge and meaning. An imagined world is an earth or universe or a system of make-believe ideas and things that may be contemplated in the mind, though it remains veritably unexperienced. In childhood, worldplay (paracosm play) refers to imaginative pretense that is persistent, cumulative, and constructive (maps, stories, drawings, and more may be generated). In adulthood, worldplay refers to the world-building narratives of writers and artists; to the plausible reconstructions, scenarios, and probable worlds of social scientists; and to the theoretical suppositions and possible worlds of scientists. As such, worldplay presents a unique opportunity to probe what-if cognition. Indeed, as the history of its study indicates, world invention as play and as creative strategy tells us much about development of imaginative thinking and the growth of creative competence across the lifespan.

This chapter explores the genesis and development of the two novels that brought J. M. Coetzee significant international notice, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) and Life & Times of Michael K (1983). It makes use of Coetzee’s papers which are housed at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, in particular Coetzee’s manuscripts and notebooks, in giving an account of his creative processes in the formative stages of his career. The chapter shows that ‘composition and craft’ in Coetzee involved a creative tension between self-discipline, organization, and rigour, and openness to the uncertainties of invention.

Edith Wharton’s personal letters have become integral to an understanding of Wharton’s life and literary production. Because of elements central to most academic projects, however, scholars are rarely able to embrace the many and varied aspects of Wharton which her letters reveal. Re-examining the letters offers a gallery of newly detailed Whartons, including the athletic teenager and happy new wife, the author who sometimes expressed racist, anti-Semitic, and classist views, and the world traveler who was domestically homey. Further, the letters demonstrate their own importance in her life: they were the means through which she maintained friendships (including those with the Berensons and with Gaillard Lapsley) that were vital to her emotional well-being. The letters reveal Wharton creating literary masterpieces and getting through the challenges of history and of everyday existence; they also demonstrate her thorough literariness, inventiveness, and humor. The re-examined personal letters offer a complex, contradictory, irreducible Wharton.