Graham Wallas Creative Process Analysis

As with all things involving the mind, creating a universal definition for the creative process and its step was challenging. One such attempt was made by Graham Wallas. He suggested that the development of an idea was a four stage process involving preparation, incubation, illumination and verification (Runco, p. 21). Each stage occurred sequentially, and built off of the previous stage: preparation involved amassing the materials and information necessary in order to start a project, incubation require the artist to put their project aside in order for the information to be unconsciously processed, illumination occurred once the artist has some insight into the creation of their work, and verification describes the alteration or revision …show more content…
Exemplified by Runco’s definition of preparation as the stage that would include, “problem identification and problem definition, as well as information gathering” (Runco, p. 21), preparation can be viewed as one of the overarching stages in which verification plays out. In my interview with Misak, he described a process that skipped half the steps in Wallas’ model, but relied heavily on the preparation phase of the creative process. Similar to Twyla Tharp’s method of placing music, articles of clothing, and written goals to help inspire the choreography for the dances she’s working on in a box (Tharp, p. 81), Misak opens a google document, and compiles pages of notes detailing short summaries of scenes, lyrics from songs that inspired him, reference images that are shot in a similar way to what he is envisioning, or any other fragment of information that will further the development of the idea. These seem like textbook examples of the preparation phase of the creative process, but on a deeper level, they are yet another example of how each step is not independent from the ones before and after it. In the interview, Misak made it clear to me that once he has collected enough information for the idea of a script to feel fleshed out, he immediately writes the script, without revisions or extra time to process his prepared material. On an artificial level, one might say that Misak simply omits other steps of the creative process, but in reality, verification is happening at the same time as preparation. As Tharp and Misak compile the materials they need to flesh out their work, they are unconsciously processing the previous pieces of information places in the box or document, and refining their ideas so that they can be easily transferred