The Seven Stages of the Creative Process

I missed a week of posting to this baby of a blog.  No good reason.  And it’s haunting me.  Like the one or two zeros I received when I decided not to do my homework as a kid.  You see, for someone who usually did her homework, that one zero would follow me throughout the marking period, inducing nightmares.  If I never did my homework I wouldn’t care.  Instead there are semesters in my past I vividly remember walking around under self-inflicted torture.

But I did write last week.  I started 2 posts and thought about at least 3 more.  Why couldn’t I just commit to a post?  Was it laziness?  Perhaps in part, but why then did I feel like stewing in self-loathing.  Is this part of my creative process?  Why does it seem that every creative endeavor requires a degree of suffering to maintain?

There are always those glorious moments of spontaneous creativity, when an idea strikes and you get so excited about it you act before your brain has a chance to naysay and slow you down.  Many times this happily results in brilliance.  But to do anything with any sort of regularity and routine, it takes discipline.  It means working, in my case writing, though the candle may be burning low and the fire of inspiration may be reduced to just wisps.  

I got to thinking, always a dangerous endeavor.  There are 7 stages of grief.  Are there 7 stages of the creative process?  When I looked up the stages of grief, I found they are eerily similar to my process.  

1. Shock & Denial: You mean I just have to come up with something genius?  Oh yeah I can totally do that.  This is also the stage at which I am in denial about having reasonable expectations of myself and suffer from delusions of grandeur.
2. Pain & Guilt: I should have never signed up for this.  Woe is me.  I don’t deserve to even have a blog even though it’s free and almost nobody reads it (yet).  
3. Anger & Bargaining: Okay blog gods.  You don’t own me.  I write whenever I want to.  And for my own satisfaction.  I don’t need to answer to anybody!  I just won’t watch TV, go on Facebook, eat dinner, or shower until I’ve written something.  (5 episodes of Law and Order: SVU, 15 status updates, the most elaborate feast I’ve ever cooked, and 2 showers and a bubble bath later.....)
4. Depression, Reflection, Loneliness:  This is where I find myself alone with my thoughts, a white screen, and a flickering cursor.  I’m waiting for the sea of negative self-thoughts to part so that I can discover the substance below.  I also give into my reclusive proclivity at this point.
5. The Upward Turn: Eureka! A coherent thought.  My fingers start dancing across the keyboard.
6. Reconstruction & Working Through: I’m pounding out paragraphs.  Sure they might not be perfect.  I might spend 10 minutes on a single sentence.  But it’s flowing.    And even if the flow slows, I am patient enough to wait for the trickle to fill my cup.
7. Acceptance & Hope: Complete surrender.  I’m done!  There that wasn’t so bad.  I can do this again.  Maybe next time I can even start at #5.  Yep, that’s what I’ll do.  I can’t wait until next week!  Now for some more Law & Order.....

So what’s you’re creative process like?  Less tortured?  Share and give me hope!