Chances are, when you think about creative process, you home in on the word creative. But are creativity and creative process one and the same? Perhaps, by thinking carefully about this question, you’ll better equip yourself to diagnose and remedy the coughs and sputters of your own creative engine. Let’s find out.

As a commercially-oriented composer for media, I’d think of my creative process as the path I follow to transform my musical raw materials (inspiration, musical vocabulary, talent, experience, libraries, tools, and so on) into a ready-to-integrate, customized musical product (cue, score, song) meeting certain specifications (emotion, mood, style, timing) that center around my client’s desire to communicate a compelling message or story to an audience of media consumers.

Curiously, the term creative process is an oxymoron. On the one hand, creative connotes something new, original, unique, unexpected, spontaneous, impulsive, brilliant, inspired, daring, vital, ethereal, and divine – seemingly out of nowhere. In contrast, process suggests orderly technique, a deliberately-organized series of steps aimed at transforming one thing into another, repeatably, reliably, and efficiently.

Thus, in creative process, it’s possible to distinguish two forces at work: creativity, and technique. They can be interpreted as contrary by nature, one spontaneous, the other predictable. Yet, in creative process, they co-function in a synergistic, complementary manner. Think yin and yang. Creativity provides the what, technique provides the how and why. One can’t do very well without the other. Creativity unbridled by technique leads to aimlessness: the job doesn’t get done. Technique without creativity leads to uninspired, dull work.

In its purest form, creativity is a sort of magic that somehow crystalizes meaningful ideas from the murky mist, in which nothing in particular was previously distinguishable – perhaps like the coalescence of the planets, stars, and galaxies out of seemingly nothing at the dawn of the universe. It is a blind god: blissfully, capriciously, and enigmatically at play, unfettered by the limits of the concrete and the practical. Its mantra is what if, what if, what if … endlessly.

It’s hard to get at creativity directly. Ironically, it’s much easier to talk about techniques that can be used to encourage creativity to occur and separate what’s useful from what isn’t. Thus, for example, creation can often be stimulated by open-minded exploration and discovery in the realm of the unknown. In effect you keep asking, what’s under that rock? Rather than seeking the familiar, you’re deliberately thinking about places you haven’t looked before, committing yourself to look there, fearlessly. Overturning each rock, you examine carefully and perhaps find a little world unto itself, home to wonders you’ve never before seen. Studying it closely, you stumble upon something that inspires you as your mind follows a path not previously traversed. Suddenly, something clicks. Some connection is made, and something new bubbles to the surface of your thoughts. That’s really cool, you think. Where could I use that? And now you have in your hand an idea, which appears, for practical purposes, to be the product of creativity.

Notice that in explaining this view I haven’t described creativity itself, so much as attitude and systematically applied technique that increase the probability that creativity will happen and that you’ll notice when it does. Often, the spark and aha! that we associate with creativity comes from such techniques of playful, enlightened, systematic exploration.

In principle, exploring in the domain of musical possibilities is no different. Just like the teaming microcosm under the rock, it’s full of dark, wet, ooky stuff – among which, now and then, an exciting gem waits to be found. But you have to make yourself look.

In his recent SCOREcast Online article, A-List Film Composer Habits for Any-List Film Schedules, Jai Megan reveals that composing film overtures, performing ethnomusicological research, and mining sound libraries are three exploratory techniques that can stimulate fast-track creativity while, at the same time, helping to separate worthy ideas from chaff. On the other hand, other practices that Jai discusses, such as sticking to templates and maps, would be more correctly characterized as techniques on the process side of the fence – in a way, helping to restrain a potentially wandering composer from unwanted creative exploration when it can interfere with meeting schedules.

I suspect that most of creative process is actually technique, even the parts of it typically thought of as most creative. If so, that’s fortunate, because technique can be taught and learned. It’s much harder – maybe impossible – to teach creativity in the abstract.

Diagnosing Your Creative Process

Maybe your creative engine is having trouble getting off the ground. If so, any of the following illnesses may be keeping it down – and I’m sure you can come up with others.

Not recognizing that creativity requires work. Let’s face it. You have to burn substantial calories to bring ideas to the surface, where you can put them to use. Think of this problem in terms of the exploration technique I described earlier: you have to turn over the rocks if you want to find the gems that may be lying underneath. You might have to turn over a lot of them to find anything of value, and you have to think hard about where you’ve already looked and where you haven’t. And, to stimulate the creative spark, you have to discipline your mind to think about what’s interesting and different about what you’re seeing beneath each rock. Disciplining your mind to follow a path it never before followed takes a lot more energy than letting it follow the same old well-worn paths.

Undermining yourself. Perhaps somewhere deep down inside, you suspect that if anyone sees your ideas, they won’t stack up well against the ideas of your competitors. You think you couldn’t bear this unfavorable comparison, so you avoid it by suppressing your own idea generation process. You deliberately don’t turn over any rocks, because if you don’t try, you can’t fail.

Trying too hard to be someone else. You think your music has to have a certain sound (which might actually be true, in some cases – e.g., consider working for a film director who’s obsessively wedded to his temp music!). So you reject too many of your own creative ideas. Well, sometimes you may have to do that. But if you do it too often, you’ll end up killing your own creativity. You have to give sufficient voice to … you.

Needing a bigger vocabulary. This is like having too few rocks to turn over. You need to work on expanding your arsenal of musical raw materials.

Not knowing when to stop. You keep turning over rocks even after you’ve found enough good ideas and should be moving ahead with what you’ve got. But you’re a perfectionist, and you think if you just turn over one more rock, you’ll find an even better idea. So you never get on with grinding out the rest of your project. Or, you may experience a seemingly endless gush of ideas that come at you so fast, you can’t capture one before another comes along to distract you. In this case, you need to assert yourself as master of your own idea generation mill, and then you need to slow yourself down to the point where you can evaluate whether you already have what you need and are ready to move on.

Fearing the ephemeral “perfect idea”. You get what seems like a killer idea, but you don’t have it really nailed down yet. It’s kind of vague and ephemeral. So you freak out worrying that you won’t be able to keep it in your mind long enough to capture it in usable form. Your excessive worry causes you to go blank, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy and losing the idea you were trying to keep. Then you waste valuable time trying hard to get the idea to come back. Get a life.