Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way: Creativity as a Big Five Trait
Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way has sold millions on one unfashionable claim: that creativity is ordinary equipment, something most people carry and few people use. She puts it plainly in a Psychology Today interview: "I argued that all of us have the capacity to write. That it's as normal to write as it is to speak." The Big Five files that same capacity under a different name.
Creativity is two Openness facets
What Cameron calls the artist is mostly two facets sitting under Openness. Imagination (O1) is the inner life: the daydreams and ideas, the readiness to picture what is not in front of you. Artistic Interests (O2) is the pull toward art and the urge to make things. Score high on both and you are Cameron's blocked artist waiting to happen, because the raw material is already there. Her argument is that most people who feel uncreative score higher on these traits than they believe, and what stops them is a layer of self-criticism sitting on top.
The book's signature tool, three longhand pages first thing every morning, aims straight at that layer. Cameron describes what it surfaces in another interview: "As I move deeper into my practice, I've recognized that there are hunches, intuitions, and ideas that come to me through writing that don't come to me in any other way." The pages do not raise your Openness. They turn down the volume on the inner critic that insists nothing you make is any good, the same voice that runs loudest in people who feel like frauds no matter what they produce.
So the trait sets the ceiling and the practice clears the path up to it. Imagination and Artistic Interests are two of the thirty facets the test scores, and they tend to travel together, so a high O1 usually has a decent O2 sitting right next to it.
Read the book: The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron.
See Where You Fall
Where do you actually fall? The 30-facet OCEAN personality test takes about 15 minutes and scores all five domains and the facets underneath them. Take the test
Research Citations
Cameron, J. (1992). The artist's way: A spiritual path to higher creativity. Tarcher/Putnam.
McCrae, R. R. (1987). Creativity, divergent thinking, and openness to experience. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(6), 1258-1265.
Johnson, J. A. (2014). Measuring thirty facets of the Five Factor Model with a 120-item public domain inventory: Development of the IPIP-NEO-120. Journal of Research in Personality, 51, 78-89.
Costa, P. T., & McCrae, R. R. (1992). Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) professional manual. Psychological Assessment Resources.