LITERARY CREATIVITY AS A PROCESS IN THE PARADIGM OF SYNERGETICS

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to consider the creative process in the paradigm of synergetics on the material of Ray Bradbury’s collection of essays “Zen in the Art of Writing” (1990) and Stephen King’s metaprose “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft” (2000). In this aspect, these works have not been the subject of special research.

Methods. The research is based on an interdisciplinary basis, as it combines specific approaches and terminology of synergetics (abrupt transitions, bifurcation and selection, self-tuning) with literary methods (structural-semantic analysis of writers’ auto metadescriptions, comparative-typological, methodological).

Results. The article shows that in the process of creating a work of art a writer reflects the elements of self-organization, which can be traced in complex open dynamic systems of any nature. The study identified the stages of creative thinking that writers go through on the path of writing a work of art as a new stable structure: wandering in the labyrinths of thinking and knowledge, abrupt transitions, bifurcations, selection and self-tuning. The results of the study showed that these stages take place in the creative process of each writer, and in the moments of branching decisions acquire different qualitative properties and are formed in each of them individually. It depends on the level of work of the creator with the information. The general mechanisms of the process of writing a literary work are revealed – it is a set of acquired knowledge, skills and creative intuition. St. King prefers a set of acquired knowledge and skills that help him to manage a new information, R. Bradbury usually works with whole blocks (experiences, worries, feelings) that lie in the subconscious. Also, a common mechanism of creative thinking of both writers is defined – it is going beyond stereotypes and patterns; reproducing the variability of ideas; selection of the main for the organization of the whole. Regardless of the mechanisms used by each of the authors, they reach a supercritical state, i.e. increased creative activity. As a result, an intuitive vision of the whole is produced, which leads to self-adjustment as the ultimate mechanism of self-organization, when in the chaos of thoughts and images the text is ordered.

Conclusions. It is established that the process of writing a work of art can be considered in the context of categories of synergetics. It is proved that the formation of a new stable structure is facilitated by the critical state of the author, which is supported by the informational influence of the external environment and is due to the subjective vision of the real world, creative abilities and intuition. Since the achievement of the attractor involves making a non-standard decision, the creator is constantly in a state of entropic variations – from synergistic phase transitions and bifurcations to self-tuning of images, ideas, representations. The main mechanism of the writer’s creative process is self-organization, which includes going beyond stereotypes and patterns, variability of ideas and their quality selection. The practical significance of the study is that it provides important material for studying the process of formation of a new image of the world by the writer and the development of techniques for writing a work as a new stable structure.