Commitment and creativity

I examined how 36 twentieth-century, American poets and fiction writers discuss work commitment. Commitment involves the resources a person invests in a work role. These resources interact with supports or obstacles the environment invests, and gains or losses from the commitment process itself. Commitment influences work outcomes, such as satisfaction and performance. I focus on commitment's influence on the outcome of creativity.;Creativity is attributed to a writer by the literary field when the writer's work transforms the standards and practices of literature. I reviewed literary critiques, prestigious award citations, and literature course syllabi, plus surveyed 45 American literature professors to categorize the 300+ writers interviewed by The Paris Review into three creativity statuses. I selected 12 writers from each status to be my sample. The statuses are: genre conformers who played by established literary rules, experimentalists who "did their own thing," and domain transformers whose works changed the canon.;My analysis revealed that commitment functioned in qualitatively different ways for these three statuses. Genre conformers compensate: they commit when they know they will be compensated with money or prestige; they balance competing commitment demands; and they compensate with effort for a perceived lack of talent, preparation, or pedigree. Genre conformers invest technique in the craft of writing to improve their confidence and social standing among writers, editors, and critics.;Experimentalists defy: they resist established rules and authorities. Experimentalists translate themselves into words to better understand themselves. They twist traditions and supports to yield new meanings through pastiche, satire, metaphor, and abstraction. But mostly they rely on themselves to gain an emotional rush plus increased courage and control over their self-expression.;Domain transformers are impassioned by the domain. They commit to a process not an end goal. They adore and resonate with a particular aspect of literature, such as a character, a poetic form, or a sound. They question and make associations with this resonance until an idea or image catalyst emerges to gather momentum in the work. Through their works, they aim to surprise the reader and perhaps change the reader's mind favorably toward the domain.