Novelist Agatha Christie believed that the best time to write was while washing the dishes.

Author Harper Lee did much of her creative thinking while golfing. And artist Grant Wood said, “All of the really good ideas I ever had came to me while I was milking a cow.”

Welcome to the wonderful world of incubation. That’s the third step of the 5-step creative process — the one where you take your eye off the ball and let the back of your mind work on your project for awhile. Then comes the miraculous moment when your brain presents a brilliant idea fully formed — aka the eureka or aha! moment.

Where did that brilliant idea come from? I don’t know. It’s all part of the magical and mysterious juju of the creative process.

Incubation works.

For decades, creative personalities have reported that their thought processes include … doing nothing.

Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, preferred the relaxed atmosphere of … ahem … a topless bar. There, he would drink 7 Up, enjoy the entertainment and, if inspiration struck, doodle equations on cocktail napkins.

The French call it l’esprit de l’escalier — the wit of the staircase. That’s when you think of a great idea on your way out of the brainstorming meeting or the perfect retort the day after someone makes a snarky remark.

Want to bring your creative ideas to life? Take a tip from creativity research: Unlock your creative potential by putting away the conscious work and opening your mind to the aha! moment.

1. Time it right.

That’s forage, analyze, then take a break. Incubation is the third step of the creative process.

My writing time is much more effective if I research and organize information the day before I write. The next day, I’m itching to get started. The reason: 16 hours of down time have really been 16 hours of incubation.

Kenneth Atchity, author of A Writer’s Time, calls this phenomenon “creative pressure.” You put off that first draft until you can hardly stand it any more, until you can’t wait to get to the keyboard and let off some of that creative steam.

But incubate before you’ve foraged and analyzed (preparation incubation), and you don’t have anything to incubate on. Don’t let incubation become procrastination. (My brother, the famous comic book artist, substitutes a rhyming word for procrastination here.)

2. Sleep on it.

Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev reportedly established the periodic table of elements after waking from a dream one afternoon. British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge claimed that “Kubla Khan” came to him in a dream.

You might come up with better ideas if you got more sleep, too.

German scientists have demonstrated that our brains continue to work on problems while we sleep. After eight hours of rest, they’re more likely to come up with the right solution.

Other research shows that the best way to keep your brain working is to get outside and move.

However you accomplish it, the incubation effect requires not working on the project at hand.

3. Multitask your way to incubation.

Don’t have time to sleep — let alone hit a topless bar — while a deadline is looming?

Instead of taking a break, move on to a new project. Forage and analyze Project A, for example, then forage and analyze Project B. While your conscious mind tackles Project B, your subconscious will be problem-solving on Project A.

Stuck? Don’t plow through. The best approach may well be to move on.

Learn more about why multitasking works, in this TedTalk.

Incubation insights.

Incubation may be the most misunderstood — and, therefore, the most frustrating — part of the creative process. That’s because it seems as if you aren’t really doing anything.

To Western eyes (and Western bosses) that can look a little … well … lazy. But the cost of going full bore on a project without a break can actually be creativity — even productivity itself.

So take a tip from creative individuals, and don’t skip this important stage of idea generation. Take a walk, take a nap, take a break — or just switch projects.

“Break,” says creativity expert Matthew May, “is the most important part of breakthrough.”

____

Sources: Jonah Lehrer, “The Eureka Hunt,” The New Yorker, July 28, 2008

William McCall, “Learn While Dreaming: Sleep Essential for Creative Thinking, Sharper Memories,” Associated Press, Jan. 21, 2004

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The first of the five stages of the creative process is to forage, or stuff your brain with information and inspiration.

The better the information and inspiration, the more creative the result.

1. To be interesting, be interested.

So get out there and learn something.

“Every really good creative person … has always had two noticeable characteristics,” writes James Webb Young, the pre-Mad Men-era ad executive who invented the 5-step creative process and put it down in a book called A Technique for Producing Ideas.

“For it is with the advertising man as with the cow: no browsing, no milk.”

— James Webb Young, author of A Technique for Producing Ideas

“First, there was no subject under the sun in which he could not easily get interested — from, say, Egyptian burial customs to modern art. Every facet of life had fascination for him. Second, he was an extensive browser in all sorts of fields of information. For it is with the advertising man as with the cow: no browsing, no milk.”

So whether you’re creating an advertising campaign or a blog post, start with market research, interviews — even Google the details you’ll need for your project.

2. Don’t skip this step.

Maybe you hate research. Do it anyway.

“Gathering raw material … is such a terrible chore that we are constantly trying to dodge it,” Young wrote. “Instead of working systematically at the job of gathering raw material we sit around hoping for inspiration to strike us.”

That’s not the creative process. That’s procrastination.

You won’t come out of the incubation stage with an aha moment unless you go through this, the insight stage.

3. Get out of your own backyard.

The farther afield you seek inspiration, the bigger your ideas will be.

“Avoid creative incest. As with actual incest, the product of creative incest just keeps getting dumber and dumber and dumber with each generation.”

— Dan Kennedy, author of “No B.S.” marketing books

Beware the “but-that’s-not-like-our-project/company/style/industry/specialty” reflex. If you’re only willing to steal ideas from communications that are just like yours — say, the websites of Iowa insurance companies that specialize in agricultural coverage — your ideas will be as limited as your foraging.

Marketing guru Dan Kennedy calls that approach “creative incest.”

“As with actual incest,” he says, “the product of creative incest just keeps getting dumber and dumber and dumber with each generation.”

Forage widely.

“Creativity is an import-export game,” writes Ronald S. Burt, a sociologist with the University of Chicago. “It is not a creation game.”

And the better material you import, the more creative your idea will be.

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Sometimes you’ll find a metaphor in an interview. Other times, it’s up to you to create one yourself.

When you find yourself in that situation, try my four-part Metaphor Generator:

Here’s how it works:

1. Jot down the unfamiliar item.

This is the concept you plan to compare. For one group of agricultural writers, that concept was “genetic mapping.”

2. Note the key attribute.

What is it about the unfamiliar topic that you want audience members to understand? In the case of the agricultural writers, the key attribute was that genetic mapping helps ranchers predict the future.

The more tangible and colloquial your key attribute is, the easier it will be to …

3. List familiar items that share the key attribute.

For “predict the future,” for instance, the list might include:

The more concrete and specific these familiar items are, the better the metaphor. For instance: “Dionne Warwick,” “1-800-PSYCHIC” and “Miss Cleo” will all yield better metaphors than “psychic.”

Keep pushing — the more items you list at this step, the more interesting and sophisticated the resulting metaphor will be. Brainstorming in a group might help: More heads are better than one on this step.

4. Craft a metaphor.

Connect the unfamiliar item to the familiar item by means of the key attribute they both share.

Then craft your metaphor with my Metaphor Template.

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My writing team had one of those tough assignments recently that only a geek like me can fully appreciate.

Our job: to transform technical medical text into a fascinating research report that patients, donors and neurointerventionalists alike can understand and enjoy. In some sections, superstar writer Dawn Grubb literally had to look up and define a term in every sentence.

But definitions and descriptions take you only so far. Sometimes it takes an analogy to fully explain technical topics to readers. So I was delighted to read this passage by Dawn:

Writing complex copy? Add an analogy.

Here’s how:

1. Ask your subject-mattter expert.

Sometimes, all you need to do to get a comparison is to ask. The question to ask to get a metaphor is “What’s it like?”

That’s the approach Roger von Oech, author of A Whack on the Side of the Head, recommends. His workshop participants ask:
“What’s it like?” to create metaphors for the meaning of life. Two of my favorites:

Life is like an unassembled abacus. It’s what you make of it that counts.

Life is like a maze in which you try to avoid the exit.

To help your subject-matter expert provide an analogy that anyone can understand, ask the question:

If you were explaining this concept to a class of third graders, what would you say it was like?

2.  Ask Google a question.

But what do you do when it’s just you and a ream of technical documents with no human expert in sight? That’s when Dawn and I turn to our best friend and research assistant, Google, for help.

Dawn started her search on neurointerventionalists by typing “What is brain mapping?” into the Google search box. The results took her to an almost poetic answer at How Stuff Works, one of my favorite Websites for defining, describing and comparing technical terms.

At How Stuff Works, you can learn enough about complicated processes and procedures — from LASIK surgery to liposuction, from cloning to currency — to be able to describe them in conversational terms. And, if you’re as lucky as Dawn was, you might find a good analogy there, as well.

3. Turn Google into a thesaurus.

Just type “define: term” into Google’s search box. You’ll get all the definitions of your terms that appear on the Web — and you just might get a free, bonus analogy.

For a blog post, I recently Googled “define: cochlear implant.” One result included this analogy:

The cochlear implant is often referred to as a bionic ear.

My lead for the blog post:

Think of a cochlear implant as a bionic ear.

4. Get a quick education online.

Once you’ve chosen your analogy, you need to develop it.

When I was developing a horse-racing analogy for a behavioral finance article in a mutual fund company’s marketing magazine, I needed a lot of help.

I turned to OneLook Reverse Dictionary and looked up horse-racing to brush up on the vocabulary. This tool lets you describe a concept to get a list of words and phrases related to that concept.

Then I looked at Wikipedia’s horse-racing page for a fast education on the topic.

Between these two resources, I found enough anecdotes and analogies, facts and phrases and images and ideas to develop extended analogies for several articles. Here’s one section of the final piece:

Find and develop your analogy.

Don’t have access to a subject-matter expert? That’s no reason not to add an analogy to make your technical topic easier to understand. Instead, use Google and other online tools to identify and develop analogies for your complex concept.

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Quick! Which is more effective?

A simple metaphor?

Bobby Holloway says my imagination is a three-hundred-ring circus.

— Dean Koontz in Seize the Night

Or an extended metaphor?

Bobby Holloway says my imagination is a three-hundred-ring circus. Currently I was in ring two hundred and ninety-nine, with elephants dancing and clowns cart wheeling and tigers leaping through rings of fire. The time had come to step back, leave the main tent, go buy some popcorn and a Coke, bliss out, cool down.

— Dean Koontz in Seize the Night

The extended metaphor — one that continues through a series of sentences — is nearly twice as persuasive as a simple metaphor, according to Pradeep Sopory and James Price Dillard’s review of 50 years of research.

So extend your metaphors.

Proper investment advice is like bespoke tailoring.

When I was editing a mutual fund company’s marketing magazine, we decided to compare customized investment advice to bespoke tailoring.

We could sustain that from the headline …

Perfect fit

… through the deck …

One size never really does fit all. Here’s how to tailor your portfolio to your own needs and dreams

… through the subheads …

Measure twice, cut once

Tailored fit

Start with these patterns

… through subtle references throughout the article …

See Ann’s extended metaphor on horseback racing.

How to write an extended metaphor

So how do you write an extended metaphor?

First, you need to understand the mathematics of metaphor. The math behind this literary device is simple:

X = Y.

Meaning passes from the base to the target, from Y to X. In “Romeo and Juliet,” William Shakespeare writes:

Juliet is the sun.

Or:

X [Juliet] is Y [the sun].

Metaphor links X to Y:

X is the target.

Y is the base.

Then extend your metaphor by exploring the base. Here’s how:

1. Choose your base.

“If you want to try an extended metaphor, think carefully about your comparison entity,” writes Nancy Kress in Writer’s Digest.

“Choose something that is specific and concrete, like a diamond. Then jot down three or more similarities between that and your original object or situation. Finally, describe the latter in terms of the former, playing with the actual words until the comparisons are both clear and enlightening.”

The sun, maybe.

2. Explore your base.

Now delve deeper into the base to find more specific elements:

• Light
• East
• Moon
• Etc.

3. Compare your topic to these elements.

Now construct metaphors comparing your topic to the items on your list. Here’s Shakespeare:

But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?

It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.

Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,

Who is already sick and pale with grief …

Extend metaphors like William Shakespeare

See how Emily Dickinson extends her base, a bird, in “Hope Is a Thing With Feathers”:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers —

That perches in the soul —

And sings the tune without the words —

And never stops — at all —

And sweetest — in the Gale — is heard —

And sore must be the storm —

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm —

You’ll see an extended base in Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” (“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood …”) And in Animal Farm by George Orwell. In fact, you’ll find this literary device in all of the best writing.

Why not yours?

Caravaggio is like chiaroscuro.

In Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane, Andrew Graham-Dixon compares the artist to the chiaroscuro — the lightest lights and darkest darks — of his paintings. Notice how the author explores the base to extend the metaphor:

He was one of the most electrifyingly original artists ever to have lived …

He lived much of his life as a fugitive, and that is how he is preserved in history — a man on the run, heading for the hills, keeping to the shadows.

But he is caught, now and again, by the sweeping beam of a searchlight.

His youth is the least documented period of his existence — the darkest time, in every sense, of this life of light and darkness.

But in its shadows may be found some of the most important clues to the formation of his turbulent personality.

How can you explore your base to extend your metaphor?

____

Sources: James Geary, “Metaphorically Speaking,” TedTalks, July 2009

*Nancy Kress, “O My Luve’s Like A Red, Red Rose,” Writer’s Digest, February 2000

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, University of Chicago Press, 2003

Pradeep Sopory and James P. Dillard, “The Persuasive Effects of Metaphor: A Meta-Analysis,” Human Communication Research, July 2002

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When a Hollywood pitchman wants to sell a new horror film about a rampaging dog, he doesn’t have time to explain the storyline. Instead of “then he did this, then he did that,” he might say:

“Think ‘Jaws’ on paws.”

Similes and metaphors are a great way to help readers understand your message. Make sure you’re moving beyond cliches — heart of stone, white as snow — and mixed metaphors to create comparisons that grab readers’ attention and help them see your ideas in a new light.

That’s just one of three ways to develop metaphors that work:

1. Anchor and twist.

Call it “anchor and twist.” To say more with less, anchor your idea to something your audience understands, then twist it to show how your concept is different from the original.

1. Anchor. “Anchoring is easier than explaining from scratch,” write Chip Heath and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick.

“Wikipedia says an alpaca is ‘a domesticated species of the South American camelid.’ That’s the explanation. Or, you could say an alpaca is like a small llama. Which one is easier to understand?”

In this case, “Jaws” is the anchor.

2. Twist. Highlight the differences as well as the similarities. In this case, “on paws” is the twist.

3. Try it. Here’s a fill-in-the-blanks template for an anchor-and-twist metaphor:

Think of _______ [your topic]

as  ________ [anchor]

for/but/with/on ___________ [twist].

You might even get an extended metaphor from this approach. 

Use this formula for a lead or sound bite in your next piece.

2. Play the metaphor game.

In A Writer’s Coach, Jack Hart shares this story:

“In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway recalls the days when he and Fitzgerald careered through the Spanish countryside in an open car, playing the metaphor game.

“One would point to an object as it came into view. The other would generate a figure of speech involving it. If he succeeded immediately, the other took his turn. If he failed, he took a drink from a jug of wine and tried again.”

Practice makes perfect. How could you play at making metaphors to polish your skills at writing analogy?

3. Practice the Popcorn Project.

In my Master the Art of Storytelling workshops, we practice observational research with the Popcorn Project. 

Get some popcorn. (Go ahead. I’ll wait.) Then ask yourself:

“What’s it like?”

Try it! You’ll find that your writing becomes more rich and interesting when you go beyond listing adjectives — white and yellow, dry, bumpy — and start using your senses to compare.

Here are some of my favorite descriptions by workshop attendees:

The raucous crowd of popcorn has the filmy finish of a satin dress that’s been thrown across the room and landed in a soft lump on the carpet.

It’s the taste of Saturday-night movies, huddled with friends, our chatter filling the night air. It’s like an old friend, reminding me of youth, first kisses and whispers in the night.

This popcorn tastes like it was popped last month and shipped across the country in a slow-moving vehicle that stopped at each rest stop the driver passed.

How an you create vivid metaphors and similes that make your messages for compelling and comprehensible?

___

Sources: Anna Muoio, “Meet Hollywood’s Mr. Pitch,” Fast Company, November 1999

Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Made to Stick, Random House, 2007

Chip Heath and Dan Heath, “Selling Your Innovation: Anchor and Twist,” Fast Company, July 1, 2008

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Don’t mix metaphors. Fewer are more persuasive. Choose one concept for comparison and stick with it.

Here are some other metaphor do’s and don’ts:

DO sync with the subject.

Match your metaphor to your message’s topic and tone.

I once found a participant in one of my writing workshops comparing her company’s new shopping mall to “the phoenix rising from the ashes.” Not only was that a cliché, it was also the wrong comparison and tone for the topic — not to mention the wrong scale.

“Thunderous dunks and lightning-quick running backs offend the serious reader in two ways: 1) They are clichés; and 2) They are questionable, even as hyperbole,” writes Steve Wilson, sports writer, Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “Unless we can create a fresh image or make a strong case for hyperbole, we should equate forces of nature with acts of humanity.”

The best metaphors are appropriate to the topic, tone, occasion and audience.

Sync with the topic. The more your metaphor draws from the topic, the more elegant the result will be, as this passage from a Time magazine movie review of sensational summer movies illustrates:

Instead of leaving the theater with a rosy glow or warm tears, dyna-moviegoers feel like a James Bond vodka martini. They have been shaken but not stirred.

Sync with the audience. This metaphor from Speechwriter’s Newsletter is in perfect sync with the audience:

I hope your holidays were holidays and that, when they were over, your brain began to hum like an old IBM Selectric.

DON’T overdo it.

A 6-course metaphorical feast can be too rich to digest — and can make your reader feel a bit nauseated after. Break it up with some plain-vanilla explanation.

“Cram three similes into a single paragraph and you become a parody,” writes Jack Hart in A Writer’s Coach. “Write page after page of featureless prose and you become a drudge. So work your way through a rough draft eliminating and adding color. A figure of speech every third of fourth paragraph is usually about right.”

Try Hart’s recommendation:

Limit your metaphors to one every three or four paragraphs or so.

Communicate, don’t decorate. The key: Make sure your metaphors don’t distract from your message. So ask, “Is this metaphor architecture? Or interior design?”

Don’t write a groaner.

Metaphors can be great. They can grab attention, clarify complex concepts and entertain your readers.

But sometimes writers, working toward a metaphor, reach too far and wind up writing a groaner instead. Take these, from an article in the latest issue of Women’s Health magazine:

Not that you should squirm like a toddler-tortured caterpillar during a workout.

Your power levels are at their highest, so make the most of them by going hard and sweating like a wool-wearing Floridian.

I don’t know about you, but I’m sweating like a wool-wearing Floridian just reading this.

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While we talk a lot about what to write — More stories! Fewer words! Shorter sentences! — we don’t focus so much on how.

Most of us were never taught to write. We were taught instead to rewrite: how to spell, punctuate and use the right grammar. As a result, we try to do three things at once: Figure out what to write, write it and get it right. No wonder writing is so hard!

But if you’ll break your work up into three stages of the writing process and write step by step, you’ll write better, easier and faster. This process has saved me thousands of hours of writing time over the course of my career.

Are you ready to write better, easier and faster? Here are the three writing process steps:

I. Pre writing

Pre writing is where you get ready to write, or develop a plan for your story. This step includes everything you do to prepare to put the first word onto the page:

A. Research. You’ve heard the phrase “hog in, sausage out.” That means that what you get out of the grinder will be no better than what you put in it.

That’s certainly true in writing. No matter how accomplished a writer you are, your story will be no better than your material. To research your message, conduct:

1. Background research. Think of this as homework. This is all the research you do to get ready for the interview — from reviewing your subject-matter expert’s deck to asking Google to define cochlear implant. That will help you:
   • Save time gathering information. Why reinvent the wheel?
   • Prepare for the interview. (No more embarrassing questions!)
   • Dig up juicy details that bring your story to life.
2. Interview. When you nail down the basic facts in your background research, you can use the interview to add humanity and detail to the story. Instead of covering the five 5 W’s, you’ll spend your precious interview minutes getting anecdotes, analogies and compelling quotes. Think Terry Gross, not your high school journalism teacher.
3. Observational research. You’ve heard of MBWA, or management by walking around? This is WBHA, or writing by hanging around — going to the scene to observe. Take a tour, watch a demo or see your subject in action. There’s nothing like being there to add compelling detail to your story.

B. Story angle. Like a tree, your message can branch out in different directions. But it should all come back to a single trunk. That trunk is your story angle.

Here’s a quick trick I use to come up with my story angle: Write your walkaway sentence — that’s the one sentence you want your readers to walk away with — in a single sentence, on the back of your business card. Use that sentence as your headline or deck, nut graph and wrap-up paragraph.

Then tape that business card to your monitor while you work. If a single paragraph, sentence or word doesn’t work to further that walkaway sentence, take it out.

C. Structure. Spend a few minutes organizing your message upfront, and you’ll save hours agonizing over it later

Put your effort up top. Most writers invest little time in the pre-writing process, focusing instead on fixing a lame draft during the rewriting phase.

Turn that investment upside down: Spend the bulk of your time getting ready to write, and you’ll spend less time fixing what you wrote. As a result, you’ll write better, easier and faster.

II. Free writing

There comes a point in any writing project where you have to follow Ernest Hemingway’s first rule for writers, and apply the seat of your pants to the seat of a chair. You have to write.

And that’s second stage of the writing process: free writing, or getting your rough draft on paper or the screen. It’s much easier to revise your work when you have a piece of writing to revise.

To free write your message:

• Get your nose out of your notebook. Typing up your notes isn’t writing; it’s typing. Moving your notes around in a Word document isn’t writing, either. The only way to write is to write. You know this stuff! Get your nose out of your notebook and write.
• Banish the grammar police. Use a dash instead of a semicolon? Write “you’re” when you mean “your”? Even misspell the CEO’s name? Don’t worry about it! You can always go back and fix your mistakes later. What you can’t do is go back and breathe life into a rough draft that never really got written in the first place.
• Write quickly, without stopping. In free writing, you want to achieve what creativity experts call “flow.” In that state, you’ll feel as if you can hardly type fast enough to keep up with your ideas — as if the words are flowing from your fingers. The only way to achieve that is to let momentum carry you along. So keep writing.
• Take a break and percolate. Stuck? Don’t just sit there. Do something! Get up. Move around. Get some fresh air. In a minute or two, you’ll find yourself back at your desk, eager to capture your next idea.

III. Rewriting

Here’s where you fine-tune your message: revising and editing and nailing grammar, spelling and punctuation.

This is what we used to call writing!

Spend enough time pre writing and free writing, and rewriting should be a breeze. Instead of heavy lifting — cutting and pasting and moving and fixing — rewriting becomes tweaking and polishing.

Why 3 stages of the writing process?

Writers who divide their writing into these steps are:

• Less likely to suffer from writer’s block
• More likely to meet their deadlines
• Unlikely to get stressed out in the process

Want to write better, easier and faster? Why not try pre writing, free writing and rewriting today?

___

Source: Richard Andersen, Writing That Works, McGraw-Hill, 1989

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Have you ever come up with a brilliant idea — on the way home from the brainstorming meeting? Developed a creative theme for the annual report while pulling weeds? Written the perfect headline in the shower?

Welcome to the wonderful world of the creative process, where working sometimes doesn’t look like working, and where sticking with it is often the worst thing you can do to move ahead.

I’ve used the five-step creative process every day since I learned it at Hallmark Cards a million years ago. But I’ve recently learned that it was the creation of a pre-Mad Men-era ad executive named James Webb Young, who put it down in a book called A Technique for Producing Ideas.

Forget the idea that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Success for a creative person is at least 51% process. This process can help you develop ideas in minutes that might otherwise take days or weeks or months to develop.

Here are the five stages of the creative process that you can use to come up with a good idea:

1. Forage, or gather information.

This is the “feed your brain,” or preparation stage, of the process. Here’s where you conduct market research and interview sources — or hit the mall, museum and movies — for the raw material that will become your idea or story.

The key thing here is: Get out of your own backyard. The farther afield you seek inspiration, the bigger your ideas will be.

Beware the “but-that’s-not-like-our-project/company/style/industry/specialty” reflex. If you’re only willing to steal ideas from communications that are just like yours — say, the websites of Iowa insurance companies that specialize in agricultural coverage — your ideas will be as limited as your foraging.

Marketing guru Dan Kennedy calls that approach “creative incest.”

“As with actual incest,” he says, “the product of creative incest just keeps getting dumber and dumber and dumber with each generation.”

2.Analyze that information.

Now that you have your raw materials, focus, sift through and organize them to see how the pieces fit together. Look for themes, holes, relationships and structure.

You might call this outlining, writing a walk-away sentence or developing a theme. That’s part of this process, sure. But the real goal is to upload the information to your brain so it can take over while you’re doing something more interesting.

3. Incubate.

During the incubation stage, let the information simmer. This is where you take your eye off the ball and let the back of your mind work on your project for a while. As Agatha Christie used to say, “The best time to write is when you’re doing the dishes.” That’s when the incubation insight shows up.

Don’t have time to do the dishes while a deadline is looming? Instead of taking a break, move on to a new project. Forage and analyze project A, for example, then forage and analyze project B. While you work on project B, you’re marinating project A.

Stuck? Don’t plow through. The best approach may well be to move on.

4. Break through.

This is the aha moment or eureka moment, aka as the insight stage. This is the magical step  where your brain presents a brilliant idea fully formed. This is where you come up with answers to questions like “What should I use for my lead?” and “How am I going to organize this thing?”

The French call it “l’esprit de l’escalier” — the wit of the staircase. That’s when you think of a great idea on your way out of the brainstorming meeting or come up with a snappy retort the day after someone makes a snarky remark.

5. Knuckle down.

Take Ernest Hemingway’s advice and “apply the seat of your pants to the seat of the chair.” In other words, turn your great idea into a great story.

Structure creativity.

Many obstacles to good writing actually stem from a bad writing process:

• Suffering from writer’s block? You might not be incubating enough. Trying to force yourself to write before you’re ready is a common cause of blank-page syndrome.
• Dealing with procrastination? You’re probably incubating for too long or at the wrong time — before you forage and analyze, maybe.
• Having trouble coming up with fresh story ideas? You may need to spend more time foraging or forage more widely.

People ask me which is the most important stage. It’s the process, people: Finish the previous stage before you start the next one. You’ll find that you’re able to come up with more ideas — and more that are worth pursuing.

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Sources: “A 5-Step Technique for Producing Ideas circa 1939,” Brain Pickings, May 4, 2012

James Webb Young, A Technique for Producing Ideas, 1939

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What’s the best way to come up with great ideas? What are the thought processes that drive the world’s most creative individuals?

For many, the secret is the 5-step creative process. The five stages of the creative process include the preparation stage, illumination stage, insight stage and evaluation stage.

In addition, there’s Step 2 of the process: analyzing your information. Once you’ve foraged the raw materials for your idea, focus, sift through and organize them to see how the pieces fit together.

This process helps creative people develop creative solutions to a problem in minutes that might otherwise take weeks or months to come up with.

So how do you get from market research to the aha moment? Here’s how to turn your raw data into creative ideas:

1. Seek connections.

While you’re sorting, look for themes, holes, relationships and structure.

“An idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements,” wrote James Webb Young, the pre-Mad Men-era ad executive who invented the 5-step creative process and put it down in a book called A Technique for Producing Ideas.

“Innovation most of the time is simply taking A, B, C, and D, which already exist, and putting them together in a form called E.”

— Wolfgang Schmitt, chairman of Rubbermaid Corp.

“The capacity to bring old elements into new combinations depends largely on the ability to see relationships.”

Poet Robert Frost agreed. “An idea is a feat of association,” he wrote.

So did South African author William Plomer: “Creativity — the power to connect the seemingly unconnected.”

As did Wolfgang Schmitt, chairman of Rubbermaid Corp.: “Innovation most of the time is simply taking A, B, C, and D, which already exist, and putting them together in a form called E.”

2. Turn the kaleidoscope.

Those who develop the habit of seeing relationships between facts, Young wrote, will produce more and better ideas.

“The process is something like that which takes place in the kaleidoscope,” he wrote. “Every turn of its crank shifts these bits of glass into a new relationship and reveals a new pattern. The … greater the number of pieces of glass in it the greater become the possibilities for new and striking combinations.”

3. Develop your story angle.

To find your focus, start with a single idea.

Think of it this way: Like a tree, your piece might branch out in several directions. But you need to build the story on a single idea or trunk. If you find a sapling — a detail or message that doesn’t contribute to that single theme — pull it out.

A topic, obviously, isn’t an idea. “Kansas City” is a topic, not a theme. “PRSA Digital Media Conference” doesn’t make a good brochure headline, because it lacks an angle. Your product name is not an idea.

Build your story on a firmer foundation. What about Kansas City, your conference or your product?

4. Organize your information.

Save time — and hit your word count the first time, every time — by organizing your piece before you write it.

Upload your brain for Step 3.

You might call this step outlining, writing a walkaway sentence or developing a theme. That’s part of this process, sure.

But the real goal is to upload the information to your brain so it can take over working on this project while you’re doing something more interesting.

That’s Step 3 in the creative process: the incubation stage. It’s one of the most important stages for achieving your creative potential.

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