The model certainly has its limitations, but it can offer a road map of sorts for our own creative journey, offering a direction, if not a destination. The creative process tends to look more like a zigzag or spiral than a straight line. Of course, these stages don’t always play out in such an orderly, linear fashion. The artist uses critical thinking and aesthetic judgment skills to hone and refine the work and then communicate its value to others. Whatever ideas and insights arose in stage 3 are fleshed out and developed. Stage 4: Verificationįollowing the aha moment, the words get written down, the vision is committed to paint or clay, the business plan is developed. Seemingly out of nowhere, the solution presents itself. It’s the sudden Eureka! that comes when you’re in the shower, taking a walk, or occupied with something completely unrelated. After a period of incubation, insights arise from the deeper layers of the mind and break through to conscious awareness, often in a dramatic way. While the conscious mind wanders, the unconscious engages in what Einstein called “combinatory play”: taking diverse ideas and influences and finding new ways to bring them together. During this period of germination, the artist takes their focus off the problem and allows the mind to rest. As ideas slowly simmer, the work deepens and new connections are formed. Next, the ideas and information gathered in stage 1 marinate in the mind. This is often an internal process (thinking deeply to generate and engage with ideas) as well as an external one (going out into the world to gather the necessary data, resources, materials, and expertise). The creative process begins with preparation: gathering information and materials, identifying sources of inspiration, and acquiring knowledge about the project or problem at hand. The four stages of the creative process: Stage 1: Preparation In his book The Art of Thought, British psychologist Graham Wallas outlined a theory of the creative process based on many years of observing and studying accounts of inventors and other creative types at work. One of the most illuminating things I’ve found is a popular four-stage model of the creative process developed in the 1920s. Notice: JavaScript is required for this content. It’s a dynamic interplay of many diverse brain regions, thinking styles, emotions, and unconscious and conscious processing systems coming together in unusual and unexpected ways.īut while we may never find the formula for creativity, there’s still a lot that science can teach us about what goes into the creative process-and how each one of us can optimize our own. Instead, the creative process draws on the whole brain. Contrary to the “right-brain myth,” creativity doesn’t just involve a single brain region or even a single side of the brain. Their creative processes tend to be chaotic and nonlinear-which seems to mirror what’s going on in their brains. What the science does show is that creative people are complex and contradictory. Creativity is as perplexing to us today as it was to the ancients, who cast creative genius in the realm of the supernatural and declared it the work of the muses. But even after writing an entire book on the science of creativity and designing a creative personality test, there are more questions than answers in my mind.ĭecades of research have yet to uncover the unique spark of creative genius. My fascination with the lives and minds of brilliant artists and innovators has led me on a quest to discover what makes us creative, where ideas come from, and how they come to life. Understanding your own creative process The four stages of the creative process: How to optimize your creative process for ultimate success have eagerly sought the answers to these questions over the past decade of my career as a psychology writer.
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