Toni Morrison once lamented that people have been taught to think of a book as a mirror, when it ought to be a door. All great storytelling — be it a novel or a poem, a film or a song — enchants us precisely because it swings open the door to a world distinctly other than our own, whose very otherness clarifies ours, returns us to it magnified and annealed. To be able to build such a world, to make it believable and beguiling, to leaps across the abyss that gapes between any one consciousness and any other, the storyteller must draw on an immense library of experiences and impressions across the infinite spectrum of life’s possibilities — those building blocks of which we make the combinatorial work we call creativity.

Long before the poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks delineated the three essential elements of creativity, Nobel laureate Elias Canetti captured this beautifully in a passage from his extraordinary meditation on mortality, copying out the “very necessary qualifications” of a great Persian storyteller from an unnamed book he was reading:

In addition to having read all the known books on love and heroism, the teller of stories must have suffered greatly for love, have lost his beloved, drunk much good wine, wept with many in their sorrow, have looked often upon death and have learned much about birds and beasts. He must also be able to change himself into a beggar or a caliph in the twinkling of an eye.

A generation before him, Rainer Maria Rilke offered a similar prescription for creativity to the young man asking his advice on how to be a poet:

For the sake of a few lines one must see many cities, men and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the small flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings which one has long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents that one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and one did not grasp it (it was a joy for someone else); to childhood illness that so strangely began with a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars — and it is not yet enough if one may think of all of this. One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. But one must also have been beside the dying, one must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises.

Another epoch earlier, Walt Whitman distilled these eternal truths even further. Under the heading “Laws of Creation,” addressed to “strong artists and leaders… fresh broods of teachers… and coming musicians,” he considers the elemental material of creative work:

All must have reference to the ensemble of the world, and the compact truth of the world.

Whether the words be few or many, practical or poetic, emanating from them all is the same fundamental truth about the nature of creativity, demanding the same basic qualifications: nonjudgmental curiosity, an empathic imagination, and a willingness to live not flawlessly but fully.