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 moreFeeling more creative
Now that I’ve got ten posts under my belt and have successfully made blogging into a weekly practice, I want to say a little bit about what I think I’m going to be doing with this for the rest of the year.
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.
Read moreModeling the creative process, part 1: Source Material
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. Among the books greatest strengths is its empirical depth, much as is the case with Flow. The lives of the creative people surveyed to produce the data on which the book’s argument is based are rich and insightful. There’s a lot of collected and collective wisdom in this book.
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