"I have to have tried and failed. I never get the answer for free." Absolutely my experience. One person who changed my entire belief around creativity is John

"I have to have tried and failed. I never get the answer for free." Absolutely my experience. One person who changed my entire belief around creativity is John Cleese. His basic premise is that creativity is all about hard, really hard work. You will spend the majority of your time coming up with the obvious ideas, and only after exhausting them will the truly creative ones happen. More often than not I will do exactly this and it isn't until a night of sleep afterwards that the best ideas surface. This has been my experience with tough problems in coding as well as those with game design.