The Source of Creativity
“Where do you get your creative ideas?!” It’s a question that “creative people” hear often from people who don’t think of themselves as creative.
And creative people aren’t necessarily able to answer the question. “I can be sitting down with clients, and be extremely focused on what we’re talking about,” says Pam Sullivan, President and Creative Director of Sullivan Creative, “and all of a sudden – boom! The idea focuses, and you know what? It’s the right idea, and everybody loves it.”
The concept of the inspired artist afflicted with the “madness of the muses” has been around at least since Plato (sidebar), but in fact a number of people have thought long and hard about the Creative Process. Although the “boom!” moments experienced by Sullivan and many others are fundamentally mysterious, quite a bit is known about how creative people work.
Reason and the Subconscious
People have been proposing models of the Creative Process for a long time. In 1926, Graham Wallas developed one with four stages.
The Wallas Model for the Process of Creativity
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The elegance and simplicity of this model didn’t prevent others from trying to improve on it, developing models with seven or nine stages (or in one case, 17!), but none of these surpass the Wallas Model for sheer economy of insight.
Note that for Wallas (and almost everybody else), creativity involves not only irrational, mysterious processes such as “illumination” but also rational, analytical processes such as “definition of issue.” Creativity is a complex balancing act which requires creators not only to imagine things, but to evaluate them and then work hard to bring them to reality. It also requires years of conscious work, training, and preparation for anybody to be good at it.
Note also that Wallas considered “laying the issue aside” as an essential part of the creative process. This is a way to turn down the rational, analytical chatter of your brain and make room for input from your subconscious.
We interviewed Sullivan Creative staffers, and designers and photographers from the New Hampshire Creative Club, and found a strong consensus about where creative ideas come from and what you have to do to get them.
Prepare Yourself
Creative people prepare themselves, not only by training and practice but by being radically open to the world around them (sidebar). “A designer observes the good examples of design in the world – other published pieces, good websites, good TV commercials, even a beautiful building,” says Chuck Provancher, Senior Art Director at Sullivan Creative.
Sullivan designer Joe Saravo agrees. “Any creative idea I have generally comes from what’s around me — color combinations in nature, surfaces… and I have a background in art history, and a lot of my ideas stem from old paintings.”
“The most successful designers are the ones who have their eyes open all the time,” says designer Steve Richard. “You can find inspiration when you least expect it, because you’re receptive to it.”
“I’m outside in nature a lot,” says Pam Sullivan. “I get out and see big blue skies and rivers, and appreciate birds and flowers. But I also love going to the city and shopping and seeing all the latest trends.”
Of course, in commercial work an essential element of preparation is alignment with the client. “It’s everybody’s dream that they come to you for your vision,” says photographer Althea Haropulous with a laugh. “Doesn’t always happen. It’s a give and take. I have to feel how far the client’s willing to go.”
“Sometimes you have clients come with not very good ideas,” says illustrator Jim Roldan. “So you do theirs. And then you say, ‘Well, there are a couple of other things we can do.’ Obviously if they still want their idea, then you do that, but many times you can sway them to something that’s a little bit better.”
Doodle, Shoot, Improvise
A lot of good creative work has an improvisational element to it. The idea is to get down a lot of ideas quickly, letting images, photos, or words free-associate with each other. Jim Roldan starts with words. “I think verbally, in terms of ideas. And then almost immediately, I’m thinking visually.”
Although the final product is finished on the computer, the design team at Sullivan Creative always starts by sketching on paper. “Lots and lots and lots of sketching,” says Joe Saravo, “which often leads somewhere where you don’t expect it to lead at all.”
“Something will accidentally look like something else,” says Chuck Provancher, “and that’s why it’s great to have another person look at your sketches. They might see something that you don’t see yourself.”
The work is often collaborative. “Everybody talks about it first and then they go off in their own direction,” says Sullivan designer Melisa Malchoff. “And then after a couple of hours, we get back together and show our sketches, and work as a group to come up with something new.”
Jim Roldan also stays away from the computer initially, and tells his students to do the same. “A lot of times people tend to think of their ideas in terms of what the computer can do, so you’re limiting yourself, thinking in terms of how it gets accomplished.”
“Sometimes I’ll just go out shooting for myself, give myself an artist’s workout day,” says photographer Kevin Harkins. “Shoot kind of as an exercise. Some days I get lucky, some days I don’t. It’s like fishing.”
Photographer Larry Dunn created a book of portraits of Honduran villagers by following a particular technique and seeing where it led him. “I take my widest angle lens and get right in their face, go through their personal space and there’s a clear space beyond that, and once you’re in there, they get really loose and you can come up with these wonderful images.”
Improvisational thinking was extended to all forms of business problem-solving by an advertising executive named Alex Osborne, who with his team in 1939 developed the influential concept of brainstorming. In brainstorming, a group comes up with as many ideas as possible without passing judgment on any of them. This technique of deferred judgment releases the brain from the analytical mode of thinking. As Osborne said, “It is easier to tone down a wild idea than to think up a new one.”
(Meteorological associations aside, the term has nothing to do with weather. The team thought of the process as a group of brains storming a creative problem, “in commando fashion.”)
Boom!
Not every creative idea appears full-blown in a sudden flash of insight. Many of them are developed painstakingly, in an iterative process, and appear gradually. But most creative people agree that the subconscious always plays a part.
“I think a lot of it is driven by the subconscious,” says Chuck Provancher. “I’ll start sketching, and something will just appear that I wasn’t planning on. I always remember one time when I was having trouble with a logo, and then I saw a painting that had nothing to do with the logo, but it illustrated a certain perspective, and that opened a door in my mind and allowed me to create a logo that was just what the client needed.”
“People ask me, ‘How did you come up with that?’” says Althea Harapulous. “And I say, ‘I don’t know, I just thought that was what it was going to look like.’ Maybe that is my subconscious; but I always just call it my visual sense.”
“When I’m working on fiction,” says copywriter/novelist Lee Richmond, “I can usually put in a four-hour stretch — after that I’m used up. When I’m lucky, there’s a period of about two hours in the middle when I’m inside the novel. The novel is writing me, the characters are speaking to me and I’m just writing everything down. My best work comes out of that place, whatever it is.”
Artists at Work
The man who arrives at the doors of artistic creation with none of the madness of the Muses, would be convinced that technical ability alone was enough to make an artist… what that man creates by means of reason will pale before the art of inspired beings.
Plato
The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.
Pablo Picasso
One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.
A.A. Milne
As for the origin of one’s wind-blown germs themselves, who shall say… where they come from? We have to go too far back, too far behind, to say. Isn’t it all we can say that they come from every quarter of heaven, that they are there at almost any turn of the road? They accumulate, and we are always picking them over, selecting among them.
Ivan Turgenev
For me art shouldn’t be a fixed idea that I have before I start making it. I want it to include all the fragility and doubt that I go through the day with. Sometimes I’ll take a walk just to forget whatever good idea I had that day because I like to go into the studio not having any ideas. I want the insecurity of not knowing, like performers feel before a performance.
Robert Rauschenburg
I waited for the idea to consolidate, for the grouping and composition of themes to settle themselves in my brain. When I felt I held enough cards I determined to pass to action, and did so.
Claude Monet
Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.
Charles Mingus
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