At GDC 2016 Bob Bates gave a talk on creativity, more specific, he touched on the character traits of creative people, phases in the creative process and organising your life as a creative person. He sited from many resources. Although GDC is a game conference, this talk will be useful to many people. During the Q&A session he said he would post some information elsewhere, but I could not find it, yet.
Finding the right question
Having to approach a problem from a different angle to solve it happened to me a lot. Often, posing the right question gets you more than halfway when solving the problem.
For example, I wanted to make a drawing with light by side lighting a piece of engraved acrylic, light only escapes at engraved spots. For engraving I wanted to use a laser cutter. But I could not get decent settings. Believe me, I tried.
In hindsight, the main problem was approaching the problem from the wrong angle. After someone suggested to model the acrylic plus light, I used Blender to do the modelling. This worked fine, but at some point I realised that my problem had nothing to do with engraving, other than keep it superficial, the main question was how to maintain transparency. Because as long as the acrylic remains transparent, light remains trapped in it, and much of the light has to stay trapped to get to the faraway reaches in the drawing.
Testing a couple of engraving settings and checking these under a microscoop to see what happened to the transparent surface, I was finally able to find the settings I needed.