Before we go into the all-important subject of the literature review, I am now going to ask you to go out on a limb, and take yet another look at your creative work - but not as a logical construct in which your thought patterns rest upon a predictable sequence, where all your ideas and input dove-tail and stand in easily recognizable neat relationships to one another - but rather by trying to identify the different strands of thought, of perception, of reasoning, of ideologies, of mental states, of processes and materials that you bring together to achieve an original result.

Many a cynical person will tell you that nothing is new, that everything has been done/thought of before, that true originality is dead even - and nowhere more so than in academia. But is this really so?

New work gets constructed upon old knowledge, by bringing together things that were never previously considered in juxtaposition to one another. For this I will give you a couple of examples from recent MA theses at our own university: Deniz Cem Önduygu brought together the fields of graphic design and evolutionary biology to create a generative software that makes graphic design artifacts through a process of elimination which is based upon the notion of "the survival of the fittest." Sinan Büyükbaş combined 'emotions' with computational sampling and created a software that builds an evolving audio/visual "library of emotions," based upon user contributions. In both cases there are strands that come from different domains (biology/graphic design in one and computer science/psychology/interface design in the other) that have culminated in output that (to the best of my knowledge) had never been done before. In both cases their writing draws its strengths from this divergence, by examining and bringing together theoretical output from multiple fields - through which they construct their "new work/knowledge."

Therefore, I would like you to now make yet another diagram in which you place the subject matter of your paper in the center and then put all the things that do not fit, that belong to different domains/fields, philosophies and cultures, to different mind-states and different inspirations from where you have taken your ideas. Identifying these different strands that you have woven together (and trust me, you will already have done so - albeit maybe unconsciously up until now) will hugely enrich your literature review (which will then spread over a diverse spectrum) and showcase what is original about your work and/or your subject matter since this originality is more than likely to reside at the intersections of things - be these perceptions, concepts, domains, cultures, inspirations or material.

Yet another beneficial by-product of this exercise is that it will help get you out of habituated modes of thinking, that are hugely detrimental to creativity - and this includes academic writing, which is a highly creative activity when approached with a mindset that considers it as such. (Read more about the evils of habit at the bottom of this post.)

The author whom I wish to quote here is Arthur Koestler, who in his book ‘The Act of Creation’ (1964) exposes his ideology on how creative acts occur; and how creativity is a play of the mind that he identifies as an act of ‘bisociation,’ that is “the sudden interlocking of two previously unrelated matrices of thought” (Koestler 1964: 121). Koestler establishes a continuity between thought patterns, in which the same ideational matrices can operate within differentiated emotional and intellectual climates to bring forth vastly different manifestations of creativity.

The image above shows the graduated relationships that Koestler set up between humor, discovery, and art; which as we travel across the triptych from left to right, show changes of emotional climate through gradual transitions from an absurd through an abstract to a tragic/lyric view of existence. These poles are archetypically represented by the jester and the sage, to whom Koestler dedicates the first two chapters of his book which rests upon the notion that in order for a creative act to come about at any phase of the gradient, the mind has to bring together two unrelated matrices of perception.

When two such independent matrices of perception or reasoning interact with each other the result can be a collision ending in laughter, their fusion may cause a new intellectual synthesis, or their confrontation may be turned into an aesthetic experience. Koestler gives many examples to such collisions, one of which he attributes to Schopenhauer to whom belongs the tale of "a convict who was playing cards with his jailers. On discovering that he cheated they kicked him out of jail." Koestler stresses that the pair of thought matrices which collided and brought forth Schopenhauer’s joke can be found in any domain of creative activity and that they are also trivalent; that is to say, the exact same pair of matrices can produce comic, tragic, or intellectually challenging effects, depending upon how they are evoked. This act of bringing together two seemingly incompatible frames of thought Koestler called ‘bisociation,’ a term which he coined in order to make a distinction between the routine skills of thinking on a single ‘plane,’ and the creative act; which, as he said, always operates on more than one plane. While the former state may be called single-minded, the latter is a double-minded, transitory state of unstable equilibrium where the balance of both emotion and thought is disturbed.

Arthur Koestler holds ‘habit’ (which he nevertheless acknowledges to be indispensable to living since it provides us with the ability to perform countless automated actions that are needed for survival) to be the biggest bane to original thought. According to Koestler, there are two ways of escaping such automatized routines of thinking and behaving. The first is plunging into dream-like states in which the codes of rational thinking are suspended. The second way is also an escape – from boredom, stagnation, intellectual predicaments, and emotional frustration – "but an escape in the opposite direction; signaled by the spontaneous flash of insight which shows a familiar situation or event in a new light, and elicits a new response to it."

The bisociative act connects previously unconnected matrices of experience; "it makes us ‘understand what it is to be awake, to be living on several planes at once.’ The first way of escape is a regression to earlier, more primitive levels of ideation, exemplified in the language of the dream; the second an ascent to a new, more complex level of mental evolution. Though seemingly opposed, the two processes turn out to be intimately related" (Koestler 1964: 45).