Ideas

Sketch by Raphael

When do ideas come to you? Do things marinate over a long period of time, culminating in an "Aha!" moment? Do you have a sudden epiphany, a new idea striking (Ouch, that hurt!) at any time of the day or night? Do you work at solving a problem, or let the solution come to you?

The nature of creativity and "ideas" is very fascinating to me. I think we all have all of the characteristics above, at different times for different ideas. Personally, I have painful epiphanies and let solutions come to me in their own time, most of the time. I may let a problem sit on the "back burner" for weeks or months before making a move on it. Right now I have one specific project in mind, that I've been interested to watch the creative process on. The basic idea came to me all at once, but I've been letting it marinate for a couple of weeks now, tweaking it, playing with it in my mind, but--it came to me yesterday that for this project, I'm going to have to start it to figure it out. Work out the kinks along the way. Its not particularly complicated, just something I have very little experience with. I am excited to work on it.

I think this method of ideas/creativity/problem solving is probably the most effective for me. Generally, with my knitting especially, I will work out all the kinks and design points in my mind. Then I will start knitting, but very early on in the knitting process, I write the pattern. The whole pattern, working out stitch and row counts mathematically instead of waiting to get to that point in the knitting. This seems to produce better garments for me. But, with this current project, that won't work! It should be interesting to watch the process develop as the project gets started.

What do you find helps ideas develop? What do you do to speed the process?