How to Create Your Body of Work, Part 1
Did you know the creative cycle has five stages according to psychology? Most people learn creative cycling subconsciously, and it can get them pretty far. But when you specifically learn what the five stages of the creative cycle are, you can begin to increase the velocity of the creation of your body of work.
For creative cycling to work, all five steps need their given moment in the cycle.
When you’re not flowing through them, you’ll know it because you’ll tend to get stuck and your projects will often get left unfinished. Sound familiar?
Maybe you tend to get stuck in the editing process where you feel it’s never quite good enough. Maybe you get stuck not having even gotten started because you’re not doing STEP ONE of the creative cycle. (We’ll talk about what that is in just a minute).
So what are the five stages of the creative cycle?
The five stages of the creative process, according to psychology, are preparation, incubation, insight, evaluation, and elaboration.
Stage 1: Preparation
Preparation is really all about being immersed in your art form. And this is something that often happens unconsciously. Because when you love an art form you tend to learn all about it and take in A LOT of content related to it.
If you’re a musician you tend to take in a lot of music over the course of your lifetime, and whether or not you realize that, you’re always storing that information away. All of this learning and immersion builds out a mental framework that you then can compare your OWN work to. Being immersed for musicians is mostly about listening to a lot of music, and when you do that consciously it can get really interesting. You can immerse yourself in unfamiliar genres. You can immerse yourself in eras of history that you may have never explored.
Preparation also includes any learning about your field of knowledge: So any music theory, any music history, physically learning songs on your instrument–all of this is preparation. And I think you can see already that the more you do this, the more the next steps of the creative cycle begin spontaneously.
You may have found that even when you were a child, you would seamlessly go from learning about music–maybe through a piano lesson–to composing. And that’s because this is stage one of the creative process, and it kicks off the rest of the cycle.
Stay tuned for “How to Create Your Body of Work, Part 2”, coming soon…
Want to take a deeper dive into the creative cycle? Listen to the Living as a Musician Podcast episode #1: 5 Steps to Creative Health.
