Notes from The Creative Process, Brewster Ghiselin, ed.

FYS 100Creative Discovery in Digital Art Forms

Spring 2007Burg

• PP. 2-3• The serious problems in the world today require

creative solutions.• Some of the most creative people throughout

history have been misunderstood, neglected, and even persecuted.

• We can’t effectively foster creativity without understanding the creative process.

• We need to apply the utmost of human ingenuity to figure out how to keep humans from destroying their own world.

• P. 3• Changes needed to come quickly, and may

seem revolutionary.• Creativity entails overthrowing the established

order in some way.• Creative people begin by being distanced from

others, but others gather to them when they finally discover that the creative person is creating something that they need.

• Creative people can have an agonizing dissatisfaction within themselves if they can’t figure out what it is that they’re cut out to do.

• P. 4• You have to have a strong impulse inside

to have the energy to transcend the established order. That impulse could be described as “the surging chaos of the unexpressed.”

• The creative impulse is not totally chaotic. It at first is not committed to one thing to be created, but it gains focus over time.

• The impulse to create can begin as “a vague, confused excitement,” “some sort of yearning,” or “a dim cloud of an idea.”

• P. 5• When the creative impulse first hits you, it’s the

beginning of an adventure. The feeling can be almost religious.

• “More often it defines itself as no more than a sense of self-surrender to an inward necessity inherent in something larger than the ego and taking precedence over the established order.”

• “The invention may appear spontaneously and without apparent preliminaries, sometimes in the form of a mere glimpse serving as a clue, or like a germ to be developed; sometimes a fragment of the whole, whether rudimentary and requiring to be worked into shape or already in its final form; sometimes essentially complete, though needing expansion, verification, or the like.”

• Creative work usually doesn’t happen by a completely conscious process.

• P. 6• Creativity usually involves some amount of

“automatism” – unconscious processes.• Chekov says it’s ridiculous to think that creativity

can take place without some plan, working as if you’re under a spell.

• Poincaré describes being aware of his thought processes when he was in a semi-conscious state, half-awake and half-asleep. His unconscious mind seemed to be freer to make associations that his conscious mind might reject. But his conscious mind sorted out the raw material first for him, so that his unconscious mind had a better chance of success.

• P. 7• “…automatic invention, far from being a sign of

diminished, imperfectly functioning consciousness, is a healthy activity supplementary to conscious invention and in no way inconsistent with it.”

• The conscious and unconscious minds don’t work in opposition to each other. And the unconscious mind is not totally without order.

• To break away from the established order, you have to submit a little to your unconscious mind.

• P. 8• “…the more vigorous creative minds among the

scientists are often inclined to drop a project when the less inventive begin to swarm upon it, and to go on to something fresh.”

• The creative person is restless, wanting to move on to something new.

• But the creative person is not an aimless wanderer.

• According to Wordsworth, the job of the creative person is “the widening of the sphere of human sensibility,…the introduction of a new element into the intellectual universe.”

• P. 9• Being creative requires the courage to move

beyond the established order.• The established order isn’t some absolute. It’s

good only insofar as it serves life.• “The faithful formalist has no chance of creating

anything.”• A “different” mind can be a good thing, but drugs

and alcohol aren’t the answer. Control and direction are often needed for creativity.

• You might think that the Romantic period in art was a throwing away of convention, form, and control. But it was asserting a new form in its place.

• P. 10

• We don’t always know the possible uses of our creations, and sometimes it doesn’t seem to matter in the short run (as in basic scientific research). Still, there appears to be a not-random selection process that goes on that points toward usefulness.

• “…creative minds feel drawn toward specific material with which to work: the creative impulse is no mere appetite for novelty for it is highly selective.”

• P. 11• To be creative, you have to “manage” your

mind and energy.• There are two main things to manage:

Figuring out what to work on, and focusing your efforts toward that end.

• You don’t always know exactly what you’re going to create when you start.

• Even though you want to create something new, the way to do it is not to fully retreat from consciousness and from the established order.

• P. 12• We have a psychic depth that is sometimes

scary to explore. Hypnosis or “stream of consciousness” writing can help us to delve into it.

• Our psychic reservoir is not static. It changes with new experiences, like the memory of a dream.

• “In the unconscious psyche and on the fringes of consciousness, change is easier because there the compulsive and inhibiting effect of system sustained by will and attention is decreased or ceases altogether. Though the system does not dissolve into nothing, it decreases in importance….”

• P. 13• When we bring images completely out of our

unconscious minds, they can come into sight “trailing clouds of glory.” But even if those thoughts and images remain hidden in our psyches, they still have a beautiful shadowy influence on the creations we bring to concrete reality.

• It may be that we have a conservative tendency and fear to let our minds be free-ranging. We trust what we know and “the way things are.”

• Creativity isn’t limited to just the arts and sciences. You can be creative in any aspect of lie.

• P. 14• “This self-surrender so familiar to creative minds

is nearly always hard to achieve. It calls for purity of motive that is rarely sustained except through dedication and discipline.”

• Your first hints that the creative impulse is overtaking you can consist of two things: You get an unexplainable satisfaction in thinking about or working with something; and thinking about it or working with it seems to unleash your “hidden riches” – your creative reserves.

• Just being stirred to creativity doesn’t mean you’re going to produce something. You have to work in a medium in which you have some talent or knowledge.

• P. 15• The first seeds of a creative idea may be

small, but this is good, because then you can allow them to grow organically.

• When you’re deep in creative work, you may appear to be in a trance, but trying to throw yourself into a trance isn’t the right way to go about being creative.

• You shouldn’t depend too much on stimulants or props to your creativity – drugs, a certain chair or pen, certain working conditions.

• P. 16• You have to be patient in the creative process.

You may need a long gestation period after the first creative impulse.

• You can’t create by an effort of will alone. Your will tends to emphasize what is already known rather than the creation of something new.

• Still, the will is useful, because it can help you stick to your creative project.

• Relying too much on your will can get in the way of your creativity, because you impose an order on things that you then don’t want to violate, and you don’t let the project take you in its nature creative direction.

• P. 17• You need to select a subject for your

creativity that you care about. • There are two areas in which planning and

hard work are important – preparing yourself by learning a subject and craft; and revising your creative work.

• This hard work is an effort of will. It involves “mastering accumulated knowledge, developing technique and skill, sensibility, and discrimination” and learning your craft.

• P. 18• You have to know the techniques of your medium.• When your creation is finished, it may look like it was

made effortlessly. But that’s deceiving. That’s part of the art.

• “Even the most energetic and original mind, in order to reorganize or extend human insight in any valuable way, must have attained more than ordinary mastery of the field in which it is to act, a strong sense of what needs to be done, and skill in the appropriate means of expression.”

• The beautiful but naive drawings of a child can be a kind of art, but they don’t take us that step beyond that makes them a real contribution to culture.

• P. 19• In the creative process, there’s a continuous

interplay between the conscious and unconscious minds. There is often a period of incubation after the initial inspiration.

• The inspiration or idea can come all at once, with great certainty. Or it can come with uncertainty and require incremental clarification.

• The revision process can be like a total re-doing of the work, rather than just a touch-up.

• P. 20

• The purpose of revision is to make sure that the creation is of use to someone other than the artist.

• The work is valuable to the artist from the beginning because it stirs him or her and makes life seem more significant. But after the work is done, it belongs to the world, which determines its significance.

• P. 21

• New things are often distrusted as being eccentric or even dangerous.

• We should listen to the voice of eccentricity in ourselves and in the world.

• We should open ourselves up to new things that seem to have potential.

• We should realize that life always changes.