page_title: Combinatory literature
section_title: Theory
hierarchical_section_title: Combinatory literature / Theory
caption_attribution_description: English: Maria Popova at TYPO San Francisco 2014
context_page_description: Combinatory literature is a type of fiction writing in which the author relies and draws on concepts outside of general writing practices and applies them to the creative process. This method of writing challenges conventional structuralist processes and approaches. To do this, the author investigates alternate disciplines outside the common channels of creative writing and literature, notably mathematics, science and other humanities. The author then applies constraints or influences from the new concepts to their writing process. This inspires creativity in literature regarding form, structure, language and narrative plot, among other things. The emergence of combinatory literature is largely the result of philosophers and intellectuals who have been concerned with the interrelated nature of disciplines and the way these combine to affect brain function. Notable proponents of combinatory literature include T. S. Eliot, Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, whilst modern writers like George Saunders have credited having a multiple disciplinary background as influential on their work.
context_section_description: Combinatory literature is similar in theory to combinatory play, however it has one key distinction. As Maria Popova explains, combinatory play relies on a component of distraction. Writing for Brain Pickings, Popova explores how distraction was used by Einstein to distance himself from his work. The result was that he gained valuable insight from the change in perspective. Popova argues that using distraction by combining disciplines is the approach to creativity that is taken by advocates of combinatory play. Whilst similar, the notable difference for writers of combinatory literature is that in order to seek new perspectives, they adopt the influence or constraint from another discipline into their work. The creative process is therefore not simply a temporary shift from one discipline and into another as Popova explains it is for combinatory play.
  Focusing on the formation of combinatory literature, Peter Gendolla and Jörgen Schäfer, who wrote The Aesthetics of Net Literature, discuss how the initial attempt at creative writing is the result of internal computation and the processing of one's experience, exposure to the world and personal subjectivity. They argue that the author's experience and perception of the world subtly and often unconsciously emerges through their writing. What appears in the first instance of creative writing is in fact computation of the world around them. On this basis it is not as creative as first assumed. Combinatory writing attempts to address this. Writing for Wired magazine in 2003, Karen Kreamer says that former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who was an advocate for combinatory play, credits creativity as the ability to "connect experiences and synthesize new things". She says in order to think creatively, a broad experience is required. As an extension of the theory of combinatory play, combinatory writing recognises both the requirement for creativity as well as the traditional, inherently personal approach to creative writing. To address these, combinatory writing seeks a broad, interdisciplinary solution that connects experience, as credited to the creative theory behind combinatory play by Kreamer and Jobs. This is done by adopting the rhetoric, principle, process or element originating from an unrelated discipline and connecting it to the writing process or as structure to the piece itself. Andrew Gallix, writing for The Guardian, says that by relying on unusual practices and ideas from other disciplines that adjust the natural limitations the writer faces, the writer is encouraged or forbidden by circumstances to write a particular way.  Reference to these disciplines replaces conventional constraints with those generally unrelated to the writing discipline. By inhibiting oneself, the author is forced to proactively engage with these constraints. This creates a work of literature that defies conventional, traditional narrative structure, form or voice, among other features, as the work takes on elements it would not previously or naturally have been subject to.
caption: Maria Popova, an advocate for the combinatory play approach to creativity
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