Staying creative: creative technique, habit and experience

This chapter focuses analysis on a practice-based research project exploring personal creativity in musical composition. Seeking simply to explore the process and experience of creative routines in a more focused way―most specifically through imposed constraints of discipline, productive time and working materials―the project developed in unexpected ways and the focused act of observation itself led to the development of unanticipated insights. \ud Initial assumptions being that: 1) The right balance of challenge/constraint and creative context can stimulate creative fluency and flow, and; 2) The wrong balance of challenge/constraint and creative context can inhibit creativity, the subtle variations of experience and the delicate structures involved in framing ‘creative balance’ in the composition process developed insights into the relationship between creative boundaries, activities, and creative identity. \ud Creative fluency and creative quality can, and routinely does, emerge from difficult and constrained creative conditions. This text presents a personal insight into the creative experience of working through a defined programme of compositional activity, deliberately designed to test and to challenge, and how the same parameters of creative activity can frame everything from the most positive and affirming of musical activity, to the most desperate and distressing. It is through both pain and pleasure that creative value can emerge