I created this website in the hope that it will help you tap into your own creativity, to discover the treasure that lives inside of you and show you that you have the skills to bring that treasure out into the world.
One of my favorite places in the world is Walt Disney World in central Florida. Walt Disney (and his group of talented Imagineers) are shining examples of creative individuals who had the courage, curiosity, dreams, imagination, passion, perceptiveness, playfulness, reflectiveness, tenacity and trust they needed to create pure magic out of a Florida swamp.
We can't all create theme parks from swampland, but we can all create what we have inside of us. I believe we all have our own gifts and it is our responsibility to share them with the world. What if Gandhi hadn't had the courage of his convictions, what if Einstein hadn't imagined riding on a beam of light, what if - Hogwarts forbid! - J.K. Rowling wasn't tenacious enough to write all seven Harry Potter books?
You have a masterpiece inside you, too, you know. One unlike any that has ever been created, or ever will be. And remember: If you go to your grave without painting your masterpiece, it will not get painted. No one else can paint it. Only you. ~ Gordon MacKenzie, Orbiting the Giant Hairball
Only you.
What are you waiting for? ;)
When asked how to create, artist Jasper Johns said:
It’s simple, you just take something and do something to it, and then do
something else to it. Keep doing this and pretty soon you’ve got something.
Creativity really is just about as simple as Johns describes it.
But let’s start with the technical explanation (for those who like the technical explanations first). The creative process involves two types of thinking – analytical thinking (left-brained, focused, conscious) and intuitive thinking (right-brained, diffuse, shadowy). Analytical thinking is based on analysis: taking things apart in order to understand them. Intuitive thinking is based on synthesis: putting things together to form new things that bring new understanding. As the brain shifts back and forth between these modes of thinking, steps or stages in the process of creativity are created. In these stages, the creating brain goes from active to receptive, from deliberate to contemplative. And then it goes back again, shifting back and forth over and over, sometimes so fast we don’t even notice. It’s a cycle of work and rest, doing and being - a sort of yin and yang of creativity.
Over the years, scholars of creativity knowledge (known affectionately in psychology circles as SOCKs) have listed and described the stages of the creative process. They have given them wonderfully scholarly names such as first insight, saturation, concentration, incubation, illumination and verification.
If Jasper Johns were to describe these stages (in his non-technical, SOCKless sort of way), he would probably say something like:
It’s simple, you get an idea about something, you gather a bunch of somethings, you do something to those somethings, you leave everything alone for a while, then pretty soon you’ve got something and then you do something with it.
It comes down to this: something inspires you, you gather a bunch of stuff, you mess about with that stuff, you leave the stuff for awhile, a brilliant idea comes to you seemingly from out of nowhere (but really from all the stuff that you left simmering) and then you bring that idea into the world. See – it really is pretty simple.
I (SOCKless like Johns) call these stages:Although we humans divide the creative process into stages (we humans like to organize stuff that way), it really is not a strictly linear affair. Stages often overlap or occur simultaneously. Thoughts and ideas can circle back and repeat through a number of iterations of any particular stage or stages of the process. When working on a complex problem or project, there may be multiple threads of the process occurring at once, and the interweaving of these threads allows even more ideas and connections to occur.
Creativity is more like interconnected loops than discrete steps, but it is still useful to think of the process in terms of stages. It helps us to understand the steps we creative people take to get from point 0 (nothing) to point S (something). It is also important to know some of the useful things that we can take with us on our creative journey. So that is what we are going to do on this web site – explore the journey that is the creative process and learn about some useful things to take along for the trip.
So are you ready to venture out and do a little exploring on creativity? Good. Take my hand, here we go, one, two, three – JUMP!