As I wrote about at the beginning of the month, one of the books I first went for to begin playing the Feelings Collector in 2021 was Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Creativity.
I have been interested in creativity and the creative process for many years now. This year, I added depth to my understanding of this, and began to reconceptualize it—with some nudging from Dr. C—as a flow activity. A few choice quotes to get us started:
“Creativity is rarely the product of a single moment; perhaps more often it is the result of a lifetime, like Darwin’s slow accumulation of facts and hypotheses that resulted in his epoch-making description of the evolutionary process.”
“Most creative achievements are part of a long-term commitment to a domain of interest that starts somewhere in childhood, proceeds through schools, and continues in a university, a research laboratory, an artist’s studio, a writer’s garret, or a business corporation.”
Among the books greatest strengths is its empirical depth, much as is the case with Flow. Creativity is based on over three hundred interviews with professionals and artists that the research team identified as “creative.” The lives of these creative people are rich and their comments insightful. A great deal of collective wisdom is collected in this book.
Csikszentmihaly’s interviewees range from artists, to academics, traditional craftspeople, business leaders, politicians, writers. Their stories about their own creativity and creative processes—while as diverse as the individuals telling them—have a great deal in common. What their testimonies about the creative process reveal are the basic outlines of what I will describe below. In a future post, I will describe my own personal model of the creative process and the conceptual framework I have developed to describe its various aspects and subtleties, and how I use it to organize my life.
Dr. C provides us with what he refers to as the “classical” model of the Creative Process, which has 5 steps.
1) Preparation
Immersion, consciously or not, in a set of problematic and interesting issues that arouse curiosity
2) Incubation
Letting ideas churn in the unconscious mind (the mysterious time)
Letting unusual connections emerge
Allowing ideas to call to each other on their own
3) Insight
“Aha!” “Eureka!”
4) Evaluation
Is the insight valuable and/or worth pursuing?
Do the connections and ideas make sense?
Is the ideal really original, novel? Is it trivial or potentially profound?
5) Elaboration
Pay attention to the developing work, tend to the idea, let it grow
Pay attention to one’s motivations, goals and feelings
Keep in touch with domain knowledge
Use the most effective techniques, the fullest information, the best theories
Get feedback
Refine and focus the idea
Find the most convincing mode of presenting the idea
Key notes and caveats to consider regarding the classical model: the model is simplified, and if followed too literally, may be misleading. Nevertheless, it is empirically valid, based on hundreds of interviews with creative individuals describing their own process. This is the beauty of Csikszentmihalyi’s work, it is always grounded in strong empirics.
At any rate, the important thing to know is that in real life, the process is rarely linear, but rather overlapping, recursive, laminated. There may be several insights interspersed with periods of incubation, evaluation, and elaboration: “how many iterations it goes through, how many loops are involved, how many insights are needed, depends on the depth and breadth of the issues dealt with.”
But, incubation period is particularly crucial to the entire endeavor. It is sometimes thought of as the most creative part of the process, the key to it all. But it also defies the rules of logic and intentionality to some regard. It evokes a black box of sorts, is shrouded in some kind of mystery. Indeed, there is a mystical quality to it, sometimes concretized in “the Muse.” Csikszentmihalyi’s sample of several hundred creative people whose interviews provide the source material for the book are unanimous in agreeing that problems must be allowed to “simmer below the threshold of consciousness for a time.” Sometimes this period lasts a few hours, sometimes years.
Many other sources that I consulted on the creative process concur. Take David Ogilvy, who describes the creative process as: “requires a groping experimentation with ideas, governed by intuition, hunches, and inspired by the unconscious” (42). He describes his process as opening the mind to “a constant stream of telegrams from the unconscious” that is only possible by “doing nothing.” Doing nothing is a fallow time with no distractions, to be filled with relaxation and what I understand to be flow activities.
Other models of the creative process share similar outlines, but they may combine or add new steps. Nevertheless, the same order of operations is in effect. While there is some redundancy here, one of the benefits of considering multiple versions of the same account is that some authors provide more elaboration or practical tips concerning one or more areas than the others.
One compelling example comes from James Webb Young’s 1939 book “A Technique for Producing Ideas.”
The basic thesis of the book is that creativity is nothing more than connecting things. Knowledge is basic and necessary to good creative thinking, but it is not enough. Knowledge must be digested and eventually emerge in the form of fresh, new combinations and relationships. Einstein called this process intuition and recognized it as the only path to new insights.
Moreover, Young argued that the production of ideas, like the production of Fords, runs on an assembly line. The production line of the mind follows an operational technique which can be learned and mastered. In learning the art of this technique, principles and method are paramount: “What is most valuable to know is not where to look for a particular idea, but how to train the mind in the method by which all ideas are produced and how to grasp the principles which are at the source of all ideas.”
1) Gather raw material
Raw materials are mental resources with which to build new combinations
“Every really good creative person […] whom I have ever known has always had two noticeable characteristics. First, there was no subject under the sun in which he could not easily get interested—from, say, Egyptian burial customs to modern art. Every facet of life had fascination for him. Second, he was an extensive browser in all sorts of fields of information. For it is with the advertising man as with the cow: no browsing, no milk.”
2) Digest the material
Review the material
Ponder over the material
3) Unconscious processing
Go do something else and “make no effort of a direct nature”
“[W]hen you reach this third stage in the production of an idea, drop the problem completely and turn to whatever stimulates your imagination and emotions. Listen to music, go to the theater or movies, read poetry or a detective story.”
4) The “Aha!” Moment
Write it down as soon as you can in as much detail as possible
5) Interrogate the idea
Is it any good?
Is it useful?
Is it generative?
Get feedback
Where Csikszentmihalyi emphasizes the importance of the incubation period, Young emphasizes the gathering raw material period: “From my own further experience in advertising, government, and public affairs I find no essential points which I would modify in the idea-producing process. There is one, however, on which I would put greater emphasis. This is as to the store of general materials in the idea-producer’s reservoir. […] I am convinced, however, that you gather this vicarious experience best, not when you are boning up on it for an immediate purpose, but when you are pursuing it as an end in itself.”
In yet another idiom, we can draw on some of the concepts of Graham Wallas, who outlines a four-stage creative process, a “dance of delicate osmosis of the conscious and unconscious”:
1) Preparation
“ready your mental soil for sowing”
“accumulate intellectual resources”
Fully conscious, part research, part planning, part entering the right frame of mind
2) Incubation
Unconscious processing
Negative fact – we do not consciously deliberate
Positive fact – involuntary “forevoluntary” mind events (mental mastication)
3) Illumination
Serendipitous alignment
Cannot be forced or willed into existence
Culmination of a successful train of associations
Sometimes a single leap
Sometimes a series of successive leaps
4) Verification
Test viability
Reduce to precision
The commonalities with Csikszentmihalyi and Young are striking. But what Wallas provides are some handy terms that characterize the mindset most conducive to the effective functioning of the different stages. (More on this next week).
Finally, this all accords well with a quote attributed to Steve Jobs: “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.”
What all these models share in common is they describe a process not unlike a rock tumbler. This will be the subject of part 2, my metaphor model for the creative process that distills these different models—combining the analytical acumen of Csikszentmihalyi with the evangelist’s tone of Young—to provides a heuristic vocabulary for identifying, discerning, appreciating, and getting the most out of your own creative process.