The creative process:

1. Discover – Read a lot. Observe the world. Notice.
2. Collect – Immediately record anything that strikes you.
3. Generate – Build on your notes to brainstorm lots of ideas.
4. Combine – Connect previously unconnected ideas.
5. Refine – Edit, edit, edit. Select the best.

The creative process lies not in imitating, but in paralleling nature — translating the impulse received from nature into the medium of expression, thus vitalizing this medium. The picture should be alive, the statue should be alive, and every work of art should be alive.

(What does that say about the creative process of poetry?) I suppose it is an example of the inexplicability of the creative process. It works through ordinary feelings, familiar relationships, even when it sets itself a grand or historical challenge. But it seizes on what is hidden from everyday view, the strangeness in our dailiness that we need to make meaning of or for. The creative process is uncanny. It remains unknowable because it works with the not yet known. As for the conditions that support creativity, I know what I need as a poet. I need time-quiet time-and pen and paper.

The creative process must be explored not as the product of sickness, but as representing the highest degree of emotional health, as the expression of the normal people in the act of actualizing themselves.

Artists must also reckon with the uncanny feeling that by the time we’ve finished a new work, we’ve often ended up creating something different from what we set out to do. This feeling of surprise, of the unexpected, can delight or disappoint us. … The creative process is an inexplicable, inspired, crystallizing place where the artist becomes an audience to the work, almost doesn’t know where it came from.

Psychologists tend to see creativity exclusively as a mental process [but] creativity is as much a cultural and social as it is a psychological event. Therefore what we call creativity is not the product of single individuals, but of social systems making judgements about individual’s products. Any definition of creativity that aspires to objectivity, and therefore requires an intersubjective dimension, will have to recognise the fact that the audience is as important to its constitution as the individual to whom it is credited.

To be creative is to not know what one is doing. The process of creation resolves the imbalance or irritation that initiated the desire to create something. Sculpture is a way of exploring, amplifying, and giving form to my enthusiasms, which are wide-ranging and often intersect each other, technically, emotionally, and spiritually.

The creative process, like anything in life has poetry to it .

Creativity is a constant process of call and response taking place inside our heads. If all is going well, the question–answer routine is like the two sides of our brain working together as if in an inner-cranial pas de deux.

With the creative process, the key is to create a lot and edit a lot.

Make more than you need, then remove everything that isn't exceptional.

Creativity is the focused combination of unlikely things. Your mind locks onto a certain element and then searches widely for something unexpected that fits with it. What can scuba diving teach you about agriculture? What can trees teach you about public speaking? There is always some connective tissue between disciplines. If you wish to be more creative, look for the connections between two previously unconnected things.

All too often too often we try to push, pull, outline and control our ideas instead of letting them grow organically. The creative process is a process of surrender, not control.

In the creative process you do not make choices about what you do not want. You make choices about what you do want.

You get in life what you create. Expectation drives the creative process. What do you expect? You expect whatever it is you're thinking about. Your thought process, the conversation in your head, is at the base of the results you create in life.