A discussion of David Campbell’s model of creativity, as he describes it in his book Take the Road to Creativity and Get Off Your Dead End.
This paper reviews Take the Road to Creativity and Get Off Your Dead End by David Campbell, a useful, hands-on approach to anyone who does in fact want to increase their creativity. It evaluates how his advice is useful not only for those who plan to enter what are typically considered to be the creative fields but for all of us. It examines how Campbell’s creative process can be broken down into five distinct phases, how each of these is essential and attempting to bypass any one of them will tend to have the effect of short-circuiting the entire process. The phases, which are described in turn with examples are– preparation, concentration, incubation, illumination and verification.
“Campbell calls the third and most important phase of creativity “incubation”. This is the phase that most of us tend to neglect in whatever activity that we are pursuing that could be aided by a creative approach. Incubation is a time in which we are not actively, intentionally focused on a particular activity. It is that phase when we have pushed that activity to a corner of our brains perhaps because we are busy doing schoolwork, or grocery shopping, or doing the laundry. Or perhaps because we are engaged in that essential if much maligned activity of “daydreaming”. The phase of “incubation” is closely tied to the next phase, which is “illumination”.”