Realities of the Creative Process

I’m currently taking Tiago Forte’s excellent Building a Second Brain course. In one of his slides he showed the following picture to give an overview of both the creative journey, and where we as a class were in our journey through the material.

While I think this is an excellent conceptual drawing and it served its purpose well, the picture doesn’t reflect the realities of the creative process. I saw people on the class forum trying to fit their creative process to this template, so I decided to draw a more accurate version.

I’ve made changes to the figure to better incorporate 3 core realities of the creative process:

I. You don’t need to wrap up everything for a satisfying creative product.

2. The transition from divergence to convergence is often gradual.

3. In a creative project, you switch between divergence and convergence multiple times.

I’ll explain these in more depth in a second, but first I want to make a change to the base figure so that we can be a little bit more precise later on.

I added a time axis at the bottom so that it’s a bit easier to see the stopping point of the project. I also explicitly defined that the width of the shape at a given time represents the amount of possibility in the project. Amount of possibility can correspond to open questions, directions you could take, or something completely different and specific to your project. These administrative changes will help keep the figure clean as I modify it through this post.

Core Reality 1: You don’t need to wrap up everything for a satisfying creative product

While it’s tempting to try, it just isn’t possible to wrap up all of the open question you encounter in a medium or large creative project. And often it can work in your favor to leave something open and your audience asking for more.

Take, for example, the trio of Cal Newport books So Good They Can’t Ignore You (SGTCIY), Deep Work, and Digital Minimalism. SGTCIY introduces the concept of deliberate practice as a key part of gaining the skills that lead to a meaningful career, but doesn’t tell you how to do it. Deep Work tells you how to pursue deliberate practice as a knowledge worker, discussing that you need to remove distractions to do so. Digital Minimalism tells you how to deal with digital distractions.

Each of these books left a question unanswered and it lead to the next book. If you’re familiar with Tiago’s PARA organization method, this is one way a project can become an area because there are still open questions to be addressed over time.

Change 1: Zone of Satisfying Conclusion

To reflect the potential open ended nature of a creative project, the end dot was replaced with a zone of satisfying conclusions. This the space where you’ve wrapped up your main points, but you can leave some threads dangling. This is at the core of intermediate packets for short projects and as we’ve seen can be useful for projects on the scale of a book.

Core Reality 2: The transition from divergence to convergence is often gradual

Graham Wallas in the 1926 book The Art of Thought introduced a 4 stage process for creative thinking (found via  Brainpickings):

1. Preparation
2. Incubation
3. Inspiration
4. Verification

The transition from divergence to convergence often happens at the end of the incubation period, through inspiration, and then into the work phase. In the incubation phase you are acting like a curious octopus (to use my favorite phrase from Paola Antonelli). You hold, and run your creative tentacles over, all the pieces of information for a particularly thorny creative problem. It’s only by holding the information, and then forgetting about it, that the problem is solved. In the curious octopus phase, the creator isn’t aware of the overarching arc of the project, because they’re so focused on the problem at hand. By the time they’re out the other end, and entering the Verification phase (where the idea is becoming reality), they’ve moved from divergence to convergence without realizing it.

Change 2: Rounding out the edges

In the original figure, the sharp lines at the point of greatest possibility suggests that one point you just decided it’s time to leave divergence mode and enter convergence mode. This is certainly possible, especially if there’s a deadline involved, but for many large scale or particularly tricky projects this change is much more gradual which has lead to rounded edges.

Core Reality 3: In a creative project, you switch between divergence and convergence multiple times

This core reality is something I’ve come to appreciate from hard, often embarrassing, experience as a long form improvisor. In long form improv show, you’re given a fixed amount of stage time to fill. You get onstage with a rough plan of the format or type of show you’re going to do and the knowledge that it has provide a compelling 25, maybe even 45, minutes of entertainment that comes to a satisfying conclusion.

For that to happen an improvisor to be managing how much possibility there is in the show at any given moment, and selectively turning on the divergence or the convergence to make sure they have just enough material to make it to the end. In the beginning, improv teams tend to be very good at one of the two creative dials. A show can be mostly divergence, which leads to a zany show where no one knows what’s happening, not even the improvisors. Or a show can be mostly convergence, which leads to show that’s essentially over with 15 minutes of stage time left and panicked group of improvisors desperately searching for material.

On my podcast Improv in Action, my co-host Jim talks about a show (and by proxy any collaborative creative project) as a quilt that you are making together. At any moment, you are either cutting out new squares (divergence mode) or stitching in the squares you have (convergence mode). If you track the squares (or in Tiago’s terms the intermediate packets) and the time line of the show, you know when you need to make more or when you need to get stitching.

Change 3: A wavy journey

In the original figure, the project was only in divergence mode for half the project, then only in convergence mode for half the project. Now it’s wavy, with periods of mostly convergence or mostly divergence but always switching between them.

This version of the picture is messy, which I think is true to creativity. It’s the mess that’s the fun part, where the joy and the struggle of the creative project lives. I thought it was worth making these changes because I’ve found over time that the creative journey only gets better the more you learn to love the mess and to find the thrill in both the ups and downs.