Can robots truly be creative and use their imagination?

I define creativity as the association between two ideas that one would not ordinarily consider a reasonable one to make but that works. I think that this is a rather simple thing to do for computers. I've been working on writing novels computationally for well over 10 years now and I'm still trying it, although I believe that within the next two to three years I will have broken its back and will produce 100,000-word novels in half an hour or so, novels that I think most people would consider to be creative. I can do uncreative short stories at this point, ones where the associations are routine and expected; they have occurred in many thousands of previous books. But I believe that in the near future my programs will be able to do creative ones. We are used to machines being used as tools that do not have a high level of cognitive ability, so it's difficult for people to think of them as being able to exhibit truly creative behaviour.