Forged With Fire:Creativity and the Creative Spirit, Part 4

An Overview of the Creative Process


The creative process falls into two parts, the intuitive/divergent and the rational/ convergent. The intuitive/divergent is the first part of the process and follows the "spark," that wonderful, life-giving, fantastically fleeting moment of inspiration. The intuitive resides in the right side of the brain, the same place as dreams, emotions and feelings and has been called the chaos or the great seething sea of the unconscious. One of the great difficulties and joys of the creative process is that we must fall down the rabbit hole or dive into this great seething sea. Creativity is risky business.


Living a creative life demands faith in your inner world and the only way I know to take the plunge is to trust that order will emerge. It must. Order is as integral as chaos to the creative process, but the order will be new and often unexpected. Gertrude Stein put it this way, "You cannot go into the womb to form the child... What will be best in it (your creation) is what your really do not know now. If you knew it all it would not be creation but dictation."


The process of gestation and birth is a perfect symbol for the creative process, whether it be the birth of a child, an animal, the emergence of a butterfly from the chrysalis or the flower from the seed buried under winter's frozen earth. Birth is a continual marvel; it warms the heart, brings out the fierce instinct to protect and fills the mind with wonder. We need to hold our own creative ideas in similar awe. We need to give them the warm, safe place in which to germinate. We need to protect them in their newborn vulnerability, which is the same as protecting our deepest self. This is precisely what, I believe, makes the first steps of a creative endeavor so difficult. Too often we don't trust our own deepest truth; it makes us feel too vulnerable or it seems incongruous with the person we think we are or must be. Our Inner Critics are all too quick to discard these newborns as silly, frivolous or worse, as boring and still worse, as downright stupid.

The poem below by Franz Kafka is a passionate refute to the Inner Critic.

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen.

Do not even listen, simply wait.

Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary.

The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked,

it has no choice,it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

-- Franz Kafka


Imagine such faith in the creative process! Imagine being self-nurturing enough to give our stories and books, any of our creations, such time and patience, Yet, if we do, Kafka promises we will receive ecstasy that brings untold meaning to our life. Mere publication pales in relationship to such abundance.

This does not mean, however, that we sit and stare at our navels and imagine the work will magically appear full blown on the page. This is a misunderstanding of Kafka's passionate metaphorical intent and also neglects the second part of the creative process that has everything to do with order and linear thought. Rather, Kafka's poem feels like a star burst of passion for the intuitive part of the process, which is for many of us the hardest part. We are not taught about the creative process; school is about growing up and out of childish meandering and play. Such a puritanical view ultimately feeds right in the Inner Critic, who then negates the intuitive and places the emphasis on educating the mind by getting good grades, getting into good colleges, getting the good job etc. etc. etc.

This is an education that is out of balance; it eviscerates the creative process and turns out lopsided human beings who believe the intellect is CEO of our existence.

"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a societythat honors the servant and has forgotten the gift." ~ Albert Einstein

"Creative minds play with the objects they love." ~ Carl Jung

"From myself to a child of five is but a step." ~ Leo Tolstoy

Just look at small children to see how seriously they take their play. In fact, play is how we first learn and through it we find delicious joy in the unexpected. How delighted children are when their "play" leads to new understanding. Creative people never lose joy in their play. Not that our creative work is always a big joy ride. It's hard work, often frustrating, but in the end, why do it if we can't ultimately find fun? Which is why, for example, writing in the white heat is so fantastic. Because the outer reality no longer has any pull and we are immersed in the mystery.

Katherine Anne Porter put is this way: "Perhaps in time I shall learn to live more deeply and consistently in that undistracted center of being where the will does not intrude, and the sense of time passing is lost, or has no power over the imagination."

No matter that we, like Katherine Anne Porter, "yearn for that undistracted center of being where the will does not intrude," it is often the hardest destination to reach, precisely because it requires an act of faith.

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