As part of playing the Feelings Collector this year, I read widely about the creative process, which led to developing the Rock Tumbler metaphor. I’m still working out the kinks with the metaphor, but it is a useful image to help remember Graham Wallis’s famous four-stage model of: (1) preparation/saturation, (2) incubation, (3) illumination, and (4) verification/implementation.
Read moreMental states for enhancing creativity
In a previous post, I wrote about the Rock Tumbler metaphor that I use as a heuristic for understanding the different stages—or aspects, phases, components, whatever—of the creative process. Breaking these stages down into concrete activities may be a more useful exercise.
Read moreModeling The Creative Process, Part 2: The Rock Tumbler
As I wrote last week, James Webb Young once described the creative process as using the “production line of the mind” to generate ideas. This metaphor for the creative process is useful because it specifies a mental technique that can be learned. The technique is not esoteric, mysterious, or romantic, but rather consists of a few simple principles and methods that you can train yourself to use in your daily life. Young’s enduring insight is that the “production line of the mind” is the source of all ideas.
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