Chapter 1 provides an overview of the Big Five trait model combined with two additional layers of personality expression: states and stories. The author explains that personality starts with traits, simple compounds that are captured in language with words like shy, belligerent, outgoing, ambitious, and friendly. By sifting and simplifying, or what is called factor analysis, all such adjectives reduce to five dimensions, the so-called Big Five. These dimensions (the dimensions are the traits) reveal the why behind creativity as well as the how, the ways in which creativity functions. The Big Five traits are neuroticism, extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness. Writer Truman Capote is used as an illustration of how traits, states, and stories are related to the personality of the artist.
