I have had some work to finish for a few weeks now and for some reason it was completely eluding me. I was aware of it lingering in the background but the energy and inspiration I needed just wasn’t happening. Today something shifted while I was doing my e-mails and my eyes wandered across the desk.

I saw something that caught my attention and while it didn’t give me the whole answer it started a train of thought that finally helped me to get started. I’m not claiming it was an ‘ah ha’ moment, I tend to agree with others that there is no single moment of creativity. The fact is I had worried away at this particular problem for weeks and finally all that subconscious work started to emerge and allow me the chance to decide if I had indeed stumbled across anything useful, instead of just feeling stuck. This put me in mind of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s writing on the creative process. He identified five steps (Creativity, 1996: 79) that certainly feel familiar to me:

• Preparation – becoming immersed in problematic issues that are interesting and arouse curiosity
• Incubation – ideas churn around below the threshold of consciousness
• Insight – the point where parts of the puzzle start to fall together
• Evaluation – deciding if the insight is valuable and worth pursuing
• Elaboration – translating the insight into its final form