Month: September 2018

Four stages of Creative Process

Neera

English socialist and social psychologist Graham Wallas proposed four stages of the creative process in his book The Art of Thought, published in 1926.

These stages are:

  • Preparation
  • Incubation
  • Illumination
  • Verification

The preparation is the feeding stage. Your brain is hungry for knowledge, so you got to feed it. At this stage, your brain is like to sponge, soaking in everything, storing it, and making subconscious connections.

During the incubation stage, your brain is still making connections. Forcing it to come up with a unique and special idea during this stage is asking for too much. Let it do its work. It knows there is all this good material it has stored in its files. It hasn’t indexed that material yet.

Illumination is the stage when your brain comes up with great ideas, connecting pieces you had been looking for, causing you to leap out of your chair and scream “EUREKA!” These “lightbulb moments” happen at all sorts of awkward places—in the shower, just before you fall asleep, on long walks alone, or on a solitary drive in the car.

In the final stage, called verification, your brain takes that beautiful, shining lump of clay and molds it into the perfect statue. It evaluates the idea, verifying that it is a realistic idea, and starts building the surrounding framework to bring it to life.

The Art of Thought is out of print, but the following excerpt from it beautifully explains that our brain can be in one or all of these four stages at a time. They are constantly overlapping each other as we’re exposed to new exploration and experiences.

In the daily stream of thought, these four different stages constantly overlap each other as we explore different problems. An economist reading a Blue Book, a physiologist watching an experiment, or a businessman going through his morning’s letters, may at the same time be “incubating” on a problem which he proposed to himself a few days ago, be accumulating knowledge in “preparation” for a second problem, and be “verifying” his conclusions on a third problem. Even in exploring the same problem, the mind may be unconsciously incubating on one aspect of it, while it is consciously employed in preparing for or verifying another aspect. And it must always be remembered that much very important thinking, done for instance, by a poet exploring his own memories, or by a man trying to see clearly his emotional relation to his country or his party, resembles musical composition in that the stages leading to success are not very easily fitted into a “problem and solution” scheme. Yet, even when success in thought means the creation of something felt to be beautiful and true rather than the solution of a prescribed problem, the four stages of Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, and the Verification of the final result can generally be distinguished from each other.”

Source: Brain Pickings

A place of one’s own

Neera

I am reading Cal Newport’s new book called Deep Work. It starts with a story about Carl Jung, and I was straightaway hooked.

I couldn’t resist sharing the story with you. It starts like this…

In the Swiss canton of St. Gallen, near the northern banks of Lake Zurich, is a village named Bollingen. In 1922, the psychiatrist Carl Jung chose this spot to begin building a retreat. He began with a basic two-story stone house he called the Tower. After returning from a trip to India, where he observed the practice of adding meditation rooms to homes, he expanded the complex to include a private office. “In my retiring room I am by myself,” Jung said of the space. “I keep the key with me all the time; no one else is allowed in there except with my permission.”

How many of us wouldn’t give anything to have a place like that ourselves where we could work uninterrupted for as long as we want to and need to?

The story goes on:

In his book Daily Rituals, journalist Mason Currey sorted through various sources on Jung to re-create the psychiatrist’s work habits in the Tower. Jung would rise at seven a.m., Currey reports, and after a big breakfast he would spend two hours of undistracted writing time in his private office. His afternoons would often comprise mediation or long walks in the surrounding countryside. There was no electricity at the Tower, so as day gave way to night, light came from oil lamps and heat from the fireplace. Jung would retire to bed by ten p.m. “The feeling of repose and renewal that I had in this tower was intense from the start,” he said.

Though it is tempting to think of Bollingen Tower as a vacation home, if we put it into the context of Jung’s career at this point, it’s clear that the lakeside retreat was not built as an escape from work. In 1922, when Jung bought the property, he could not afford to take a vacation. Only one year earlier, 1921, he had published Psychological Types, a seminal book that solidified many differences that had been long developing between Jung’s thinking and the ideas of his onetime friend and mentor, Sigmund Freud. To back up his book, Jung needed to stay sharp and produce a stream of smart articles and books, further supporting and establishing analytical psychology, the eventual name for his new school of thought.

Jung’s lectures and counselling practice kept him busy in Zurich – this is clear. But he wasn’t satisfied with the busyness alone. He wanted to change the way we understood the unconscious, and this goal required deeper, more careful thought than he could manage amid his hectic city lifestyle. Jung retreated to Bollingen, not to escape his professional life, but instead to advance it.

Carl Jung went on to become one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century.

In the next post, I will share some insights from the book on how to work deeply.

Public art of Canberra

Neera

Canberra has some weird public art pieces dispersed throughout the territory. But there are a few I like a lot.

This sheep on a chair is a satirical salute to one of Canberra’s early pastoralists—James Ainslie, who came to the region in 1825. A sheep watches while the other one is sitting on an armchair with its legs up, its jacket neatly folded on the side, which reminds you of the politicians.  

Canberra, Australia’s capital, is memorably known as “a good sheep paddock spoiled.”

Another one of my favorites in the city precinct is Bush Pack by Amanda Stuart, a pack of seven bronze dogs in three groups that appear to be running down City Walk. 

In a gully where a creek used to run, three overgrown Casuarina seed pods appear to have dropped out of a grove of Casuarina trees and to be rolling down the grassy slope. At night, the seed pods are lit from within by a gentle fiber optic light. These bronze pods are by the artists Mathew Harding.

Another one of Mathew Harding I like is called Cushion, for apparent reason. People have often seen lounging on this large stainless steel cushion. A poem by Marion Halligan lies on scattered pages on the granite plinth below the cushion to form a tribute to Garema Place.

This bronze and copper sculpture by Keld Moseholm, called ‘On the staircase’ contrasts a series of small human forms with the architectural weight of an oversized staircase. The artwork has a philosophical aspect by reflecting on the effect of reading on the spirit – ‘the more I read, the smaller I feel.

Tour of the Gorman House Arts Centre upgrade works and the official launch of the relocated On The Staircase sculpture.

This relatively new sculpture (commissioned in 2011) recreates an iconic photograph of John Curtin (1885-1945), Australia’s fourteenth Prime Minister (1941-45), and Treasurer Joseph Benedict (Ben) Chifley (1885-1951), who would become Australia’s sixteenth Prime Minister (1945-49). Curtin and Chifley routinely walked along this route to the Provisional (Old) Parliament House from the nearby Kurrajong Hotel – where Labor Members of Parliament generally stayed, while Parliament was sitting. Curtin and Chifley are two of Australia’s most respected Prime Ministers and they were strong supporters of the development of Canberra as the nation’s capital.

This one is by far the best.

Known as The Parcel (by Alex Seton) looks real, but is a carved illusion where an everyday object is transformed into an object of art. The artist has sculpted green and white marble to recreate a package with the creases and dents of a long journey. The contents are yet to be revealed.

More next time…

Deep dive in creativity

Neera

Below are ten things I find worth sharing this week.

  1. This week I explored creativity. From trying to figure out What is creativity, I explored Is being creative means being original, and shared the Seven Principles of Creative Living.
  2. “Creative is not a Noun” post by Austin Kleon is priceless. I recommend that if you do nothing else this week but find an hour to listen to his video you will have the magic formula you are looking for to unleash your creativity.
  3. Did you know that 72% of people have creative insights in showers? Or that trauma has hidden creative properties? 7 Surprising Facts about Creativity reveals how the brain’s creative circuitry holds some unexpected secrets that scientists are only just beginning to understand.
  4. The most impressive post on beloved writer Oliver Sacks’ Creative Process, his never-before-seen manuscripts, brainstorm sheets, and notes on writing, creativity, and the brain.
  5. My deep dive into understanding creativity got scientific with Your Brain on Creativity article on Psychology Today. Check it out, it might be a little heavy reading, but the conclusions or two scientific studies are priceless.
  6. How about this for an everyday story? A humble seven-year-old boy, Jack Berne, started Fiver for a Farmer campaign with his schoolmate with a goal to raise $20,000 for drought-stricken farmers has unexpectedly raised a massive $1 million.
  7. I found this inspiring story of a home cooking blogger who is replacing her lawyer income with a blogging income. Libby Hakim of Cooking with Nana shares how a series of four mini-breakthroughs led to her discovering how to replace her previous job as a lawyer with income from her blog.
  8. What is synaesthesia and what’s it like to have it?
  9. It is so accurate that it is almost freaky. I took this 16 Personalities test and finally found out why I do what I do. Try it, it is free.
  10. The book I am reading and immensely enjoying at the moment is Deep Work.

Seven Principles of Creative Living

Neera

Lawrence G Boldt, a writer, career consultant, and personal coach, gives seven principles for creative living in his book How to Be, Do or Have Anything:

1. Among human beings, creativity is a natural, and not an exceptional, trait. Birds fly, fish swim, and humans create.

2. For the individual, personal freedom and self-fulfillment depend upon the conscious expression of his or her innate creative capacities. Without such expression, one will meet with unhappiness and unnecessary limitation.

3. Social and psychological factors may limit or impede an individual’s innate creativity. These factors can be overcome.

4. The creative process follows a definitive pattern and is essentially the same for all outcomes.

5. The creative process is knowable and understandable. It can be taught and learned.

6. The more one creates, the more confident he or she becomes in his or her ability to create.

7. Experience gained in applying the creative process in one area of life can be transferred to other areas.

Is being creative means being original?

Neera

What is being creative mean to you?

If you think a creative is someone who creates something unique out of the blue, then you are as wrong as I was when I didn’t understand creativity.

Creativity is nothing more than a process. A process of creating something. From imagination to reality. From an idea to a tangible thing. We all create something all the time. That should be enough to make us all creatives.

But we don’t feel creative because we don’t think we are creating something ‘original.’ Because the literary definition of creativity is the “use of imagination or original ideas to create something new.”

Most of us get fixed on the idea of being original.

How to be original when everything has been done before? All story plots have been used endlessly, every emotion has been exploited, songs repeat themselves and there is no new way to paint the sky.

We get so obsessed with being original that we stop creating. We get frustrated because we can’t find a new way. All the time we are looking for a completely original way to do things.

This is where we are mistaken.

The true creators know there is nothing new under the sun. The concept has been best explained by Jobs, a genius in creativity. He writes in I, Steve: Steve Jobs in His Own Words.

“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.

Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”

In a beautiful article for The Atlantic, Nancy Andreasen, a neuroscientist who has spent decades studying creativity, writes:

“[C]reative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections, and seeing things in an original way—seeing things that others cannot see. … Having too many ideas can be dangerous. Part of what comes with seeing connections no one else sees is that not all of these connections actually exist.“

James Webb Young offered the same point of view many years earlier:

“An idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements [and] the capacity to bring old elements into new combinations depends largely on the ability to see relationships.”

Creativity belongs to the artist in each one of us. To create means to relate. The root meaning of the word art is to ‘fit together’ and we all do this every day. Not all of us are painters, but we are all artists.

Each time we fit things together, we are creating—whether it is to make a loaf of bread, a child, or a day.

“This energy which we call “making” is the relating of parts to make a new whole. The result might be a painting, a symphony, or a building. If the job is done well, the work of art gives us an experience of wholeness called ecstasy—a moment of rising above our feelings of separateness, competition, and divisiveness “to a state of exalted delight in which normal understanding is felt to be surpassed.”

In this video, How to be Creative, a web series exploring art, internet culture, and people creating it, filmmaker Kirby Ferguson urges people to let go of this romanticized idea of “originality.”

He agrees ideas don’t actually come out of thin air; in your subconscious, you were still processing all these influences from memories, education, experiences, etc.

He also mentions that humans create new ideas by copying, transforming, and combining other ideas.

Artists take existing ideas that nobody would have thought of combining and connecting them; making them work.

So, in nutshell, creativity is nothing more than connecting pre-existing ideas into new ideas.

We all are capable of doing it.