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. For a refresher:
Preparation: collect your rocks and select those to tumble, add water and grit,
Incubation: turn the tumbler on, go do something else while it works,
Insight: turn the tumbler off, open up to inspect,
Capture: take a look at your rocks, are they polished enough?
Elaborate: select the rocks you like, make something with them
These steps—preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification to use Graham Wallas’ framework—have long been recognized by researchers interested in creativity. Honestly, the Rock Tumbler may only add artifice and whimsy to the equation, but it was fun to come up with! At any rate, being aware of these stages is important, because as David Kadavy writes:
Creative work is messy, but it still tends to follow these stages. If you work with these stages, creative insights can come more easily, with less discomfort. You can work with the ebbs and flows of your creative energy so that you work like a perpetual motion machine — each action feeding the next, and your energy being replenished before it’s drained.
Breaking these stages down into concrete activities may be a more useful exercise. Fortunately, Kadavy has already done most of the heavy lifting for us here, naming them: prioritize, generate, explore, research, polish, administrate, and recharge.
Prioritize: planning and scheduling, giving you a clear sense of what you want to be doing at any given time
Generate: actually making things, like blog posts, sculptures, drawings, podcast episodes, new recipes, etc.
Explore: deliberately indulging your curiosity and collecting the raw materials for ideas
Research: creative problem solving, whether identifying the problem itself or the solution to it
Polish: improving execution, making sure that your idea or solution actually works
Administrate: take care of all the practical matters of life so they don’t intrude upon the other activities
Recharge: rest, pursue other enjoyable aspects of life, allow your unconscious mind to do its thing
Kadavy is right to point out that putting these activities into practice is an ongoing process in life. I broadly agree with his advice on three counts. First, that the most important to implement first are creation, prioritize, and recharge; second, that the key to success is to make all of these activities habitual, and third, the best way to start is by building a “tiny” habit, making the daily goal of your generation so small that it is impossible to fail. It has certainly been the case for me that as he writes, “once you’ve grown through these three stages […] other elements should start falling into place.
The only thing I would add to this framework is to suggest where these different activities fit into the stage-model of the creative process. Far from being a pointless taxonomical exercise, I think this has some diagnostic value for helping us identify where we could use a tune-up if things aren’t going so smoothly with our process. Interestingly, some of these concrete activities could be part of multiple stages, there isn’t actually such a clear and neat place where the activities Administrating and Generating fit, and two of the stages don’t involve any of the activities in such a straightforward fashion.
Preparation
Prioritize, Explore, Research, (Generate?), (Administrate?)
Incubation
Explore, Research, Recharge
Verification
(Generate?)
Elaboration
Generate, Polish, Research, (Administrate?)
Clearly, this idea still needs some polishing, and also some prioritizing to determine its general utility. What it does for me, at least, is show that the classic four-stage Helmholtz-Wallas model of the creative process is highly recursive from an activities-oriented point of view. In terms of integrating all of this with Csikszentmihalyi, what I see is that each of these distinct domains of activity could be transformed into a flow activity by bringing an autotelic approach to it—that is to say, to undertake them as ends unto themselves, for the sheer enjoyment of it. More on this to come…