I love this quote. For me, it captures the strange phenomenon of getting to the end of a creative process and thinking ‘of course this is the answer’ when at the outset the task felt impossible and the path ahead was wholly obscured. This phenomenon can also strike the audience – think of your favourite book, song or film. It feels ‘inevitable’, as though it appeared fully-formed to the maker whose only task was to turn it into reality, like following a recipe. It is only when the creative process is revealed (who doesn’t love a ‘making of’ documentary?) that the frustrations, cul-de-sacs, unrealised options, rough drafts, and overwhelming number of decisions become clear, and the result feels anything but a given.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this sense of inevitability; it feels particularly relevant to the making of the Creativity Guide. I had the initial germ of an idea for this resource about three years ago. It came from numerous conversations with colleagues who were looking to work more creatively, but were often starting from a restricted understanding of the myriad options available to them, very much a consequence of how creativity is viewed generally. It was often drummed into us at school that creativity meant “being arty”, some people have it and others don’t, and - at the most extreme - it can be seen as a fluffy nice-to-have or “wacky” (bleurgh).

This led to the thought – what if I had a ‘creativity diagnostic’, some visual way of mapping all the different ways that creativity is manifest, so that colleagues could wander around the terrain for themselves and see the options? I started a Mural board in 2022 to try to create this map. I showed it to a few people, and tinkered with it from time to time, but was not making much progress. I just couldn’t find a way ahead and even though I knew what I wanted to achieve, I couldn’t see what it should look like.

Skip ahead to early 2025. Courtesy of a fantastic online workshop - Beyond the Goldfish Bowl, created by Dr Harriet Hunt (Centre for Environment and Human Health) - I was made aware of Scriberia, a London-based agency who advocate for the power of drawing as a means of both thinking and communication. Impressed and inspired, I wanted to learn more and signed up to their mailing list. As luck would have it, Scriberia had new offices and were offering taster sessions in their InkTank studio. Yes please, and I had just the problem to put on the table.

Five generous colleagues – Prof. Kerry Chappell, Rebecca Edgerley, Dr. Harriet Hunt, Dr. Caitlin Kight, and Dr. Rob Pearce - all experts in creativity from a range of disciplinary perspectives, agreed to join me for the InkTank session, to test if my idea-germ could be turned into something viable. That session was on 3 April 2025. Less than four months later, with more iterations than you could shake a stick at, and the help of many others, we arrived at our beautiful, ‘inevitable’ Creativity Guide. Now that I can see it, and it’s in my hand, the answer feels so obvious. But this is the deception of hindsight. There was no path ahead and we forged it together; looking back over my shoulder, it’s tempting, but misleading, to believe the clearing was always there.

In the following selection of images, I aim to illustrate the creative process broken down into its component, messy parts. The good, the bad and the ugly are all there, and I take responsibility for the last two in particular. I enjoy tracking how ideas go through growing pains before finding their form.

If you are interested in obtaining a paper copy of the Creativity Guide please contact us on artsandculture@exeter.ac.uk to arrange a time to collect one from either our Streatham or Penryn office.

You can also discover take a look resources linked to each section of the guide here.