The Social System of Creativity: How publishers and editors influence writers and their work | Elizabeth Paton

Summary: The creation of a book does not end with a draft manuscript. Rather, writers seek out publication and communication with an audience as the culmination of their work. During this phase, individual actors and institutions other than the writer make decisions that can affect the content, style, design and reception of the work as well as the publication of future works and the writer’s career. As such, publication and communication represent a network of relationships an individual writer must negotiate before they may be considered creative. This complies with Csikszentmihalyi’s (1988, 1997, 1999) systems model, which posits that, in order to understand creativity in any area, it is necessary to investigate not only the individual and the domain of knowledge they draw on but also how the social system operates, making judgements on and shaping that knowledge. It also correlates with Bourdieu’s (1977, 1993, 1996) concept of the field as the contexts for social and cultural contestation. This paper investigates two specific points of engagement with the field, namely the publisher and the editor, and how these members of the social system of Australian fiction writing influence both the writer and their work.