There is no such phenomenon as the creative process in writing. Rather, it is a creative process which is unique and applicable to every individual work of fiction. It would be simplistic and, indeed, misleading to refer to the creative process as though it was a single system of progressing towards a desired end in writing. The term can be no more than a convenient summary label for a complex set of cognitive, motivational and emotional activities that are involved in perceiving, remembering, imagining, appreciating, thinking, planning and shaping a work of fiction.

To complicate matters, one must differentiate between process and method. It is an important point of distinction which students of creative writing sometimes find difficult to grasp. Method is related to guidelines which are often given to writers by publishers of romance fiction. It is a crippling, soulless way of creating fiction. The imagination is guided towards a certain end, usually with the male and female protagonists vowing to love each other forever in a setting resplendent with a tranquil sea and a tropical sunset.

The creative process has its inception in a writer's curiosity and interest in the unravelling of the world beyond that which is obvious in its empirical state. In his essay, 'Reflections on Writing', Henry Miller suggested that "Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery. The adventure is a metaphysical one: it is a way of approaching life indirectly, of acquiring a total rather than a partial view of the universe." A vital part of the journey is to be introspective, to turn inwards and scan different landscapes that can be barren, sparsely populated or teeming with life. One breaks the journey and waits patiently for clear sounds and distinct movements. Even when you intuitively know that there is 'something' in the maze, it is often shrouded in a mist and appears to recede as you approach it. You rarely get a complete picture. Frequently you settle for fractured sightings and fleeting images, sporadic eruptions and, occasionally, violent earthquakes because they are the factors necessary to achieve a conciliation between the belief in one's own imagination and the reality of the external world.

There is a desire to know about the mesh of human emotions and ideas which impact on social reality and its evolution, the compulsion to explore the darkness of the human heart, the wish to tap into spirituality beyond its simplistic manifestations in religion and to understand the tensions inherent in the co-existence of the sublime and the profane within us.

Writing is born from these impulses within the creator. The impulses are chaotic and unpredictable. But in that chaos is the reactor of imaginative energy. The creative process relies on instinctive judgement. You learn to accept your limitations and strengths, and accommodate personal idiosyncrasies. For instance, I have reconciled myself to the inability to plan a novel in any detail whatsoever. That is not due to a lack of effort. My sense of a central character dominates every aspect of the story in its early stages. I allow setting, incidents, dialogue, minor characters and themes to languish at this stage of writing. My first draft of a novel is no more than a detailed outline which seeks to answer two questions. What am I saying about the condition of life through my protagonist? How has he developed as a person morally, emotionally and intellectually? Once I am satisfied that there is development and growth in this fictitious being, then I turn to structure, language and the rest of the content. This is when I strive to achieve, what Henry James observed as "the sense of felt life." There are innumerable variations in this process and the direction it takes.

Perhaps Carl Gustav Jung best summed up the enormously complex phenomenon of art in his essay, 'Psychology and Literature', when he suggested that "Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realise its purposes through him." The notion of being enslaved to aesthetics will certainly be familiar in varying degrees to those who create art, for which artist has not experienced that obsession which is the driving force that compels the imagination to be productive? But the understanding of that force and its process is another matter.

The creative process involves inspiration, development and evolution of ideas. Each creative effort with a new work of fiction entails an engagement with disorder. Invention demands an absorption in what John Livingston Lowes calls "the surging chaos of the unexpressed." The complexity of the process cannot be unravelled and analysed as though it were an empirical entity. It mutates as the work develops and leaves few traces of its inception for the conscious and logical mind to understand. There is some consolation in Jung's contention that ". . . the creative act, which is the absolute antithesis of mere reaction, will for ever elude human understanding. It can only be described in its manifestations; it can be obscurely sensed, but never wholly grasped."

The process can begin suddenly and in any shape or form. It can be a yearning, an image, a sighting, a fragment of a dream, a snatch of a conversation or an object. As a casing point, it is pertinent to scrutinise John Fowles' explanation of how he came across the idea for his novel, The French Lieutenant's Woman. In an essay titled 'Notes on an Unfinished Novel', he outlined the beginning of his process of creativity for the novel: "The novel I am writing at the moment (provisionally entitled The French Lieutenant's Woman) is set about a hundred years back . . . It started four or five months ago as a visual image. A woman stands at the end of a deserted quay and stares out to sea. That was all. This image rose in my mind one morning when I was still in bed half asleep. It corresponds to no actual incident in my life (or in art) that I can recall". This exemplifies what Alfred Whitehead said about "the state of imaginative muddled suspense which precedes successful inductive generalisation . . ." There is a maddening vagueness about the beginning. It is a swirling chaos, a fear of confronting a monumental problem, dissatisfaction and what Voltaire chose to call "constructive discontent". Yet instinct tells the writer to follow it and nourish it, or as Stephen Spender observed: "a dim cloud of an idea which I feel must be condensed into a shower of words."

Any insight into the process of creativity is fragmented, but it does lead to some understanding of the rebellious and erratic workings of the imagination. Experience teaches one not to despair that the imagination cannot be regulated to be productive in conformity to a working schedule.

Ever since Plato recorded Socrates' contention in Ion that a "poet is a light and winged holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and reason is no longer in him . . .", there has been a mystique surrounding the creative writer and the process by which works of literature are shaped. Renaissance philosophers, in particular Nicholas of Cusso and Pecco Peccino, developed the idea of the human link with the divine through creativity. In fact, Nicholas of Cusso contended that the capacity of a human being to use his or her imagination to continue the process of inventing the world accounts for the nobility of mankind. And if one were to believe Plato in/ Phaedrus and Shakespeare's Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the writer is either mad or in the company of madmen and lovers.

Historically, creativity and madness have been linked because of that elusive phenomenon of inspiration. In the creative process, there are two stages that need to be distinguished the moments of inspiration, when ideas and suggestion appear in consciousness, and the moments of expansion or development of such ideas. The problematic part is inspiration because it is not in our control. We cannot decide to be inspired at a moment of our choosing. Nietzsche, in Ecce Homo, describes the moment of inspiration when "something profoundly convulsive and disturbing suddenly becomes visible and audible and with indescribable definiteness and exactness. One hears one does not seek; one takes one does not ask who gives . . . There is the feeling that one is utterly out of hand . . . Everything occurs without volition . . ."

Whether the inspiration that appears at the threshold of the writer's reflexive consciousness is an impression, an emotion or a fantasy, it is 'already there' in the creative process. What eludes an analysis is the origin of the inspiration.

Twentieth-century views on creativity, it seems, have clung to this mystical notion of creativity's link with the irrational or the supernatural. William Faulkner observed that an "artist is a creature driven by demons . . . He has a dream. It anguished himself so much he must get rid of it." James Joyce said that "an artist is the magician put among men to gratify capriciously their urge for immortality." And more recently, the American novelist, Tim O'Brien, wrote an essay, titled 'The Magic Show', in which he claimed that whatever we call the process of creativity, "it is both magical and real." The unanswerable question that must consistently bother anyone involved with creative writing is: 'Is there an altered consciousness during creativity?' Of course, one must not forget Coleridge and the circumstances in which 'Kubla Khan' was written to mystify us even further. To complicate matters, both Freud and Jung contended that creativity is a process that occurs outside consciousness.

God, demons or magic? Is it at all possible to find logical and definitive explanations for what transpires in the creative process? I doubt it. We do not live in an age of absolutism, but in times dominated by one of 20th Century's enduring legacies of Physics Werner Heisenberg's 'Uncertainty Principle'. We can theorise and speculate without making definitive pronouncements. Aspects of the human mind continue to be elusive to rationalists. But we must take T. S. Eliot's advice and not "cease from exploration."

What is important is the willingness to search the labyrinth of the imagination. For in that quest lies self-awareness, exposure to one's own personality and the knowledge of who and what we are as human beings. Our evolution through life is itself a process and not a method. The process of creating any form of art is a metaphor of the bigger picture, one that we use to make sense of what makes us tick.

Adib Khan is a Bangladeshi-born Australian novelist.