A Creative Member of LinkExchange

I've always had a fascination with creativity. I think I inherited a creative bent from my mother whose hobbies included drama and calligraphy. I'm a strong believer in the therapeutic value of creative pursuits in preventing professional burnout. I've discovered, however, in my reading and quote collecting that there are differing views about the creative process.

To some it is an ungovernable process:

To others it is a matter of governing work habits:

To Chagall it is a affair of the heart:

While to others creativity is a matter of the mind:

Creativity has also been described as a series of phases:

For most, it will be seen that the process of such high creativity consists of three phases:

1) the prelude ritual;

2) the altered state of consciousness or creative spell during which the creative idea is born, starting with vibrations, then mental images, then the flow of ideas which are finally clothed in form... and,

3) the postlude in which positive emotions about the experience suffuse the participant.

Gail Sheehy in Pathfinders defined four phases of the creative process:

1) Preparation - gathering impressions and images

2) Incubation - letting go of certainties

3) Immersion & Illumination-creative intervention/risk

4) Revision - conscious structuring and editing of creative material

 

Roger von Oech in A Kick in the Seat of the Pants feels the creative process consists of adopting four roles:

The hallmark of creative people is their mental flexibility... Sometimes they are open and probing, at others they're playful and off-the-wall. At still other times, they're critical and faultfinding. And finally they're doggedly persistent in striving to reach their goals. From this I've concluded that the creative process consists of our adopting four main roles, each which embodies a different type of thinking... These roles are: Explorer, Artist, Judge and Warrior.

And finally some feel that creativity doesn't follow any system at all:

In my personal pursuit of the creative process I also found that compilers of quotation books have their own ideas about creativity. I found that the quotations I was looking for were indexed under such diverse topics as aptitude, success, talent, genius, inspiration, questioning, discovery, imagination, idea, innovation, invention, simplification, courage, common sense, determination, perseverance, persistence, failure, knowledge, education, patience, accomplishment, proficiency, and originality.

I wanted to index my collected quotations into a system which made sense to me. I began to see similarities between the "phases" of Sheehy and the "roles" of von Oech as shown in the table below. I finally settled on an indexing system based on five components of the creative process which I initially labeled as: Ability, Inspiration, Innovation, Modification, and Perseverance. I never was very satisfied with using those five nouns as component identifiers. I wanted the system to be more personalized and action oriented. I eventually changed the components to action verbs as part of FRANK's Creative Process: Forage, Reflect, Adopt, Nurture and Knuckle Down. These components are discussed in Components for Creativity