Thinking Differently as Creative Journey

Chapter 9 excerpt from The Power of Thinking Differently by Javy W. Galindo

—

By approaching the creative process as a journey, I had hoped to break it down into stages to make the creative undertaking less daunting. The creative hero is often better off focusing on the very next step of their path, rather than its end. Too often we think ahead to our finished product, even though the next step is our immediate concern. Furthermore, we cannot design our future since there is so much that is out of our control. But, by being aware of the creative process we can be cognizant of how to approach it. We can design how we think of it.

As I had mentioned earlier, the process is not necessarily a linear one. Speaking of it in linear terms simply makes it easier to describe with language. As Csikszentmihalyi points out, people often jump between stages non-sequentially or even repeatedly between the same few ones.

…the process is constantly interrupted by periods of incubation and is punctuated by small epiphanies. Many fresh insights emerge as one is presumably just putting finishing touches on the initial insight…Thus the creative process is less linear than recursive. How many iterations it goes through, how many loops are involved, how many insights are needed, depends on the depth and breadth of the issues dealt with.1

Also, the creative hero more often than not will experience occupying more than one stage at a time. So, it may be more accurate to think of these stages as different aspects of the creative process. The improvisational jazz musician needs to be in many stages at once while in the midst of playing a solo during a jam session. She must simultaneously relax, work, listen to the unconscious — allowing ideas to come, but also consciously aware enough to discriminate bad notes from good ones, adjusting accordingly on the fly. In essence, they are fighting the Dragon, escaping the Siren, exiting the Cave, and then integrating them all back again simultaneously – as if by magic.

—

Please leave comments, questions, and suggestions below.