This is an exploration of the nature of the creative process informed by my personal experience as a multidisciplinary creative and others who have contributed greatly to this topic. For many, it seems as if the creative process is torturous while for a select few creative elite, they seem able to produce prolifically while maintaining high quality. I do not think this happens by accident.
With insight on both sides of the coin, I’ll offer my perspective into why this may be the case.
My main premise is that the creative process involves several distinct phases. Creative friction is experienced when there is a mismatch between the phase and the task. To use an automotive metaphor, the perceived difficulty of creative work is undisciplined internal context switching. Editing and producing at the same time is like two-footing – driving with the emergency brake on, while also keeping one foot on the brake and the other slamming the gas pedal.
I’ve written before on my experience working with Kenny Werner’s Effortless Mastery framework, which has been definitive in my approach to music and beyond.
While the matter of human creativity may have distinct nuances, let us first look to the patterns of nature for inspiration, as Taoistm and other wisdom traditions suggest. Whether or not we deserve special merit, our biology at least suggests an unavoidable relationship with nature. We ignore or deny this at our peril, though much of so-called human progress is attributable to mastering, overcoming or exploiting nature. At the most charitable interpretation and aspiration, we could say we aspire to cooperate with nature.
From the day and night, to the lunar phase of the month, to the seasons of the year, there are cycles within cycles all around us. Why should we be any different? For the day, we have dawn, noon, dusk and midnight as cardinal points. For the month, there is the new moon, the first quarter, the full moon, and the third quarter, with the transitional phases in-between bringing the total to eight. For the year, the extremes of the winter and summer solstices are balanced by the spring and autumn equinoxes.
Though we use the term creative process as if it were a single thing, at the lowest resolution, there are at least two, like the hemispheres of our brain. While perhaps an oversimplification, two is a good place to start. The creative and the analytical. For writing, that might look like writing and editing. For music and other performing arts, practice and performance.
However, does that offer sufficient nuance?
While there are at least two phases, other thinkers posit a range from three, to four, to six or seven. As David Kadavy writes in Mind Management, Not Time Management, philosopher and scientist Helmholtz gave a 70th birthday dinner speech at the end of his career, outlining the preparation, incubation and illumination phases. Social psychologist Graham Wallas codified this speech and added one more stage, verification. Together, he called these the “four stages of control”, a seminal work on creativity research. Kadavy elaborates on these stages and the concept of Cal Newport’s deep work, suggesting seven distinct mental states and corresponding tasks: prioritize, explore, research, generate, polish, administrate, and recharge, whereas writer and thinker Jordan Hall formulated the concept of deep code, his attempt to describe distinct stages underpinning all learning: discernment, attunement, coherence, clarity, insight, and embodiment.
While I appreciate the nuance and variety of these other systems, I propose the middle ground of four distinct phases: the collective, the connective, the creative, and the critical phases of creativity.
The collective phase covers research, observational learning and absorption. It’s hard to generate something out of nothing. The collective phase refers to the accumulated base of pertinent knowledge and experience.
The connective phase is playful and includes experimenting with new and old inputs gathered from the collective phase in an effort to find novel combinations, something approximating constellation thinking. The idiom of “connecting the dots” certainly applies here. As someone inclined to aspect intellectualism from the trait openness from the Big Five personality model, I find it quite satisfying to notice underlying patterns, similarities and nuances across different systems of thought attempting to describe the same phenomenon.
The creative phase is generative and productive, focused entirely on maximizing quantity of output without regard for quality. Quality comes later, though baseline quality improves over accumulated expertise and knowledge – i.e. the countless iterations of the collective phase that we undergo throughout a lifetime.
Last, the critical phase subjects the outputs generated from the creative phase to scrutiny, sorting, sifting, deleting and reorganizing its contents. Ironically, there is a deeply creative but understated aspect to the critical phase, with all of its attendant decisions. In a performative context, it is analyzing what went well and what requires further attention for the next creative cycle.
While I feel an underlying confidence with music, one of the challenges I’ve encountered with writing is its fundamentally verbal nature, which seems to provoke discursive narrative we associate with self-defeating inner dialogue. A few practices I’ve come across from varying sources seem to converge on this idea of freewriting, to really practice pure creative output without reflexively editing, deleting or stopping as you go. It is this stopping and editing as you go that slows the writing process down to a crawl as we engage in a back-and-forth, constantly switching from editor to creator, grinding the whole process to a halt, or at least a very slow crawl. Then there is the phenomenon of writer’s block, which I would call excessive metacognition, or as the saying goes, paralysis by analysis.
Ultimately, each of us is responsible for our own process. The stop-start edit-as-you-go approach to creativity was my natural disposition and I’m still unlearning that way of operating. It may very well work for some and that's okay. I would argue that this results in a slower overall and energetically intensive process, whereas practicing the discipline to keep each phase distinct is worthwhile and conserves energy in the long run.
One practice I’ve explored that comes from a variety of other sources is dictation – multiple business owner, author and marketer Mike Shreeve, authors Chris Fox and Kevin Anderson swear by it. A similar practice that marketer, comedian and business owner Ian Stanley and writing teacher Natalie Goldberg promote is the practice of writing without stopping, whether by hand or typing.
A variation i've experimented with is not looking at what I’m typing or speaking so as not to provoke self-reflexivity of examining outputs prematurely. It's admittedly a hard habit to break. Like a kind of meditation the idea is to use peripheral awareness to attend to the sensation of the fingers moving by looking away, close the eyes or conceal the monitor. Alternative objects of attention include the flow of breathing, cultivating an indirect attention as the fingers move or the mouth speaks. A mastery of touch-typing would be a prerequisite to allow such an output, though dictation remains an option. It’s also best practice not to look at the output of voice-to-text as that generally results in another faltering stop-start sort of pace.
To distill and reiterate my main point. The reason why we experience the creative process as difficult is a failure to appreciate its different phases and the mismatch between phase and task. Though in a starkly different context, the trick is, to quote the punk rock band Offspring, “you gotta keep ‘em separated.”
"the perceived difficulty of creative work is undisciplined internal context switching." This has my full attention right now. The most recent episode of Plain English with Derrik Thompson meditates on this idea of Focus and avoiding Distraction. As a storyteller, I am always distracted. This is just how it goes for me. I work like a person in the middle of a spider web that senses and responds to everything at once. I am productive, I suppose, because I block out times with certain objectives, but I'm not really sure about that.
I so appreciate your distinction and illustration of the creative process as phasic. We do a thing, and then we do a different thing—and so often blend it all together. Thank you for this!