Marie-Louise von Franz

On the creative process from the book Creation Myths

...."People sometimes resist becoming creative because one's would-be creativity is always so much more impressive and important than the little egg one lays in the end when the birth takes place. When you are full of would be ideas, then you feel you will go far beyond...., you will bring out an idea that will revolutionize our whole age, and so on. That is what one feels-quite legitamately, by the way-when one is pregnant, because the whole unconscious is contaminated with this preconscious creative idea. You carry the whole Godhead in your (psychic) womb, so to speak. But when you sit down and do the hard work of setting forth your idea, there is a terrific disillusionment, and what you finally produce is generally a sad remnant of what you felt it to be when it was still inside your own psychological womb. Inside it feels tremendous, but when you bring it out there is always a relative reduction. Parturiunt montes nascetur ridiculus mus, as the Latin proverb says: The mountains have labor pains and a ridiculous little mouse is brought forth. This is the typical state, but the only thing to do is under all circumstances to bring the mouse out, for sometimes it is more than a mouse. Sometimes it is only a mouse, to be sure. But you can never decide ahead what it will be, and the only way to check whether it is a living child or a rather miserable, crippled abortion is to bring it out.
.....(after the birth of an idea) In many instances, one's condition fluctuates between a jubilant high and a morbid depression; that is, at one point one feels one has really achieved something great, and at another time one feels very depressed. Every creative person has to go through this process to some degree.....Only after a period of about five or six years has one enough distance so that one can look at it as though another person had done it. At the time of creation, one is either too close, or too far away from, one's work. It is too new and fresh.
...Sometimes the problem is also how much you can bring out, and how much you will have to leave behind."

psychology