Douglas Adams and Creativity

M J Simpson is the biographer of the remarkable and much-missed author, Douglas Adams. Hitchhiker: A Biography of Douglas Adams by MJ Simpson, with a foreword by John Lloyd, is available in the UK from Hodder and Stoughton. A slightly revised edition, with a foreword by Neil Gaiman, is available in America from Justin, Charles and Co.

Douglas Adams was at one and the same time immensely creative and yet frustratingly uncreative, a contradiction which would no doubt have pleased him if anyone had pointed it out to him during his appallingly brief 49 years on this planet. He was a fount of ideas, especially in later life as he soaked up knowledge from the best minds in the world, sometimes through their writing, sometimes more directly (Stephen Hawking recalls having a pleasant and fascinating dinner with him). Even his worst books, the fourth and fifth in the Hitchhiker’s Guide sequence, both written under ridiculous pressure, contain more sparkling gems of wit and wisdom than many nominally better novels.

But ideas are not enough. Ideas must have a form in order to be effectively communicated, and that is where Adams’ creativity failed him. Chapters were squeezed out of him like the very last squirt of toothpaste from a tightly rolled tube. Activities which in his younger days were designed to promote the flow of ideas - most famously, very long baths - became instead displacement activities, distractions from the writing regimes which his publishers forced on him, sometimes literally locking him in hotel rooms and not letting him out until a novel was finished.

If there is a moral to be learned from Adams’ life (apart from: don’t spend three decades drinking large quantities of extremely good wine and then sign up for a Californian gym) it is that a huge quantity of ideas can actually hamper a creative mind, as each appears before the last one is fully formed. Many people have written that Adams had writer’s block, but that’s nonsense. He had writer’s overflow, which if anything is even worse.