The Creative Process
From Three Roads to Awareness by Don Fabun
The creative process appears to be a rather simple one. It seems to require only putting two or more systems together to yield an original combination or pattern. We think it can be done. Let's assume that most of the following steps are followed by each person who successfully completes the creative act:
DESIRE: Whatever the reason, creativity starts with motivation. The person must want to create something original. It may be that he wants to solve a problem that bothers him. He may simply be curious about something he doesn't understand. He may want to express some personal experience (as in the arts). He may want to make more money through the introduction of a new invention, process or technique. Or it may simply be a response to a change in the environment. Creativity starts with motivation.
PREPARATION: Information is gathered. This may be through research, experimentation or exposure to experience. The process is analytical and it is a way of "making the strange familiar."
MANIPULATION: Now, with all this material before him in hismind, on the workbench or in piles of notes on slips of paper, the creative person begins to poke at the material and try to find some new pattern. A "new way of looking at something familiar."
INCUBATION: In most instances, the solution does not appear immediately. The problem is "dropped," and the person turns to some new problem. For reasons we do not fully understand, the unconscious mind keeps wrestling with the problem.
INTIMATION: A feeling of premonition wells up into the conscious mind a feeling that a solution is about to be found.
ILLUMINATION: Sometimes the experience incites a "eureka" or "a-ha!" of the surprise of a pleasant discovery.
VERIFICATION: This is the process by which the new pattern is examined and valued. Certainly some creative acts appear to be purely fortuitous. Pure luck probably plays a greater part in discovery than in invention
This brings us to metaphor, a statement of a new relationship between what had previously been considered unrelated. By stating similarities between the dissimilar or new systems of relationships among the unrelated, metaphor makes the familiar strange, an operation that lies at the heart of creativity.