There are two essential phases in the creative process.
The spontaneous phase is where ideas sprout, unintentionally and seemingly out of nowhere. Everything interesting goes in the hopper, including the slightest observation, things seen, imagined, overheard, or misheard.
Whether it’s a notebook or your phone when you’re gathering string, the medium is less important than recording.
“I’m not writing it down to remember it later,
Field Notes
I’m writing it down to remember it now.”
The best notebook is the one you have with you. But seeing the world starts with being open to the repetition of arbitrary stimulus and its messy upshot: discovery.
The revision phase is where ideas get pieced together like a puzzle.
You go through all your notes, images, sketches, etc. for the purposes of synthesizing concepts and tossing away others.
When you start to piece together artifacts, revelations seems to arise out of epiphany. But there is no such thing as immediate discovery — such is the aggregation of everything we learned along the way.
The two-fold creative process never changes so it’ll always be there to fall back on if and when you feel stuck. First, we collect, and then we deduce.
The more you practice the creative process the better you get at connecting ideas and turning them into reality.