Five Steps to boost your creativity
Being a writer isn’t just about sitting down at your keyboard and waiting for the ideas to flow. In fact there can be several steps you need to work through before you’re even ready to start writing; researching details for your novel, carrying out interviews, visiting archives and evaluating source material and labelling and filing your notes so you don’t waste time searching for them when you need them are some of the many writing-related tasks you might need to do before the actual ‘writing’ starts.
Planning a creative project is different for everyone, but it generally follows the same basic five steps outlined below. Each step will vary depending on you as an individual and the creative medium you’re working with. It’s not a linear process and it can take time to move through each of the steps before you’re ready to progress to the next one, so don’t panic if your work-in-progress takes you on a slightly different path.
1. Preparation
This initial stage is a kind of pre-writing, where you gather your information and inspiration from other sources and start to become familiar with your material.
This could be formal research, either online or at a specialist archive or library, or it might be more informal, for example browsing new trends on Pinterest or checking out what’s recently been published in your industry or writing genre.
2. Incubation
You need patience for this step, but it’s where the magic happens and your creative project starts to take form.
Once you’ve absorbed the information from step one, spend some time examining your material. Do you have all the information you need, or are there gaps that need further research? How do your different concepts and ideas fit together? Have new ideas emerged, or an unexpected obstacle that needs to be resolved?
Allow your thoughts and ideas to marinate in your mind. This can be done consciously while you are brainstorming and making notes, or subconsciously – sometimes it helps to step away and do something completely unrelated so that your mind feels refreshed and energised when you return to your work.
3. Illumination
Think of this as the breakthrough moment, the “Aha!” lightbulb moment when the perfect idea hits you and your scattered thoughts fall into place.
It often happens unexpectedly, maybe when you’re doing that unrelated activity or thinking about something completely different.
Make sure to grab your notebook or sketchbook and jot your thoughts and ideas down quickly before they get lost!
4. Evaluation
This is the reasoning stage. It’s the hard part, where you look at all your ideas and narrow them down to identify the ones that will work and the ones that won’t.
For each idea ask yourself:
- Is this idea worth pursuing?
- Does this idea work with the theme of the overall project?
- Are there any tweaks or changes I could make?
- Do I need to develop this idea further, or maybe save it for a different project?
You don’t have to use every scrap of research in your writing. Think of it as compost that enriches your creative work and the eventual finished piece. Nothing is ever wasted; even if the reader will never know about that little gem of information you stumbled across, it will still strengthen and deepen your work.
5. Implementation
Now it’s time to get down to work where your ideas, skills, knowledge, experiences, plus all the things you did during the previous steps, all come together to create the final draft.
The outcome will be a finished piece that you can celebrate and feel proud of, and hopefully even get paid for!
Conclusion
Creativity doesn’t have a definitive process, yet it does have general steps in each stage of the process. Try this five step method in your work when you feel stuck, to help you solve problems, come up with new ideas and be more creative in your writing life.
And most of all, remember to have fun and enjoy yourself.
