“Few capacities hold as much lifelong value as an active imagination: it impacts every aspect of our experience.”

The Runaway Species explores human creativity in all its forms, from Picasso and Beethoven to the Apollo 13 mission and scientific breakthroughs. Since I write fiction, I viewed the authors’ observations from a writing perspective: Where have I witnessed these principles at work in contemporary literature? How can I apply these ideas to my own writing?

The authors focus on a few key ideas, rephrasing their points throughout the book to drill them into the readers’ heads, presenting their thesis in new and beautiful ways each time. Real-world examples are plentiful, with some being explored in-depth, such as Picasso’s artistic influences, and others being glossed over as part of a litany of stories. I actually started keeping a list of topics to watch videos on later because I was so curious to learn more about the figures and inventions mentioned (such as George Washington Carver’s story, and how Shrinky Dinks inspired a cheaper way to fabricate microfluidic chips). I listened to the audiobook read by Mauro Hantman and greatly enjoyed it, although I missed out on the cool pictures and diagrams in the print version.

Here were some of my takeaways:

“We seek the sweet spot between familiarity and novelty.”
Although we don’t want to be surprised ALL the time, we crave the disruption of routine. With repetition suppression, our brains become accustomed to new stimuli and our neural responses lessen with each encounter (self-driving cars were used as an example). So, everything loses its sense of novelty over time. That’s why many readers scoff at knock-offs of The Hunger Games and Twilight, or tropes that have been done a hundred times, like the Chosen One. We don’t like our stories to be predictable…but neither do we like them to be too unpredictable.

Many popular books provide that happy middle-ground between familiar and new. Harry Potter took wizard tropes like hats and broomsticks to give us The Sorting Hat and Quidditch. Writers can create new stories by combining familiar elements with novel ones.

Bending, breaking, and blending ideas are the cornerstones of innovation.
It’s obvious that our brains love to draw connections between things, regardless of the validity of those connections. Despite the mistakes in logic our mental wiring can cause, it does allow us to bend, break, and blend ideas that already exist to create an innovative mash-up. As the authors comment, “The human brain doesn’t passively take in experience like a record; instead, it constantly works over the sensory data it receives and the fruit of that mental labor is new versions of the world.”

Bending might be best described as a “remake” of an already-existing prototype. Breaking is the rearrangement or subtraction of pieces (e.g., the word “gymnasium” being shortened to “gym”). Blending is the most self-explanatory term—the combination of different elements, as in mythological creatures like centaurs or sphinxes.

Successful novels often demonstrate at least one of these techniques. The classic Cinderella tale is given a fresh coat of paint with a new setting in Marissa Meyer’s Cinder, bending the story to suit its new surroundings. House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski satirizes the world of academia by borrowing and breaking parts of its form. Jay Asher was inspired to write 13 Reasons Why after visiting an audiocassette tour at a Las Vegas museum and blended that form with his reflection on a young family member’s suicide attempt.

The number of novels that are nearly autobiographical never ceases to amaze me; Sherman Alexie’s Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince borrow a great amount of material from the authors’ real lives, to the point that they are “bending” their life story into fiction. The authors of The Runaway Species note that the arts aren’t divorced from our experiences; they are our experiences in distilled form.

Art redefines our view of what’s possible.
It’s interesting how we have invented our own vision for what is deemed a “futuristic” aesthetic, and so our designs become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as in Tesla’s car doors that open upwards and the sleek look of its new semi-truck design.

As far as fiction, the sci-fi genre in particular has shaped our culture, with real-life inventions borrowing their names from sci-fi concepts. When we discuss ethical quandaries in the real world, we often reference fictional worlds, such as the government surveillance of Orwell’s 1984 and the Three Laws of Robotics from Asimov’s I, Robot.

True innovators proliferate options, cut most of them, and never shy away from change.
The authors also state something along the lines of “A stronger creative process entails having lots of ideas and letting most of them die” and “It’s a good habit not to commit to the first solution.” These tenets are especially important in writing fiction. In brainstorming ideas, I always try to make a list of at least ten options, knowing that the first few items in the list will be the most obvious choices and that those at the end will be the most surprising and exciting. This is true of any genre, whether one is devising jokes or creating a magic system. Options breed originality.

We can improve our education system by encouraging students to take creative risks.
I have a feeling that the authors were itching to write a book on improving the American educational system. They seemed passionate about the future of innovation and how we can encourage the next generation to pursue new ideas. We need to teach children risk tolerance so that they accept failure as part of the creative process. We need to encourage students to proliferate options and “go different distances from the hive,” to deviate from what is already established. We need to provide a “balance of unstructured play and imitating models.”

Writers, too, can become more innovative if they actively choose to take risks, formulate lists of ideas, and mix imitation of past authors with experimentation of new styles and ideas.


The Bottom Line: The very act of thinking about how creativity works inspires me to be more creative, which is why I valued this book.

“The best creative acts arise when the past is not treated as sacrosanct, but as fodder for new creations—when we renovate the imperfect and refashion the beloved. Innovation takes wing when the brain generates not just one new scheme, but many, and stretches those ideas to different distances from what is already known and accepted. Risk-taking and fearlessness in the face of error propel those imaginative flights.”