My favorite insight about finding your creative voice
This week’s essay is for any of you who create things.
It’s a story that’s been on my mind, from the Finnish-American photographer Anro Minkkinen (in Oliver Burkeman’s lovely book, Four Thousand Weeks).
Minkkinen points out that a very common problem for beginner creators — or even intermediate creators — is that their work can feel unoriginal. Derivative. Generic.
Imagine, Minkkinen offers, that you're early photographer who’s spent three years working on platinum studies of nudes. You show your work to a gallery owner, only “to be told your pictures aren’t as original as you thought, because they look like knockoffs of the work of the photographer Irving Penn.”
Discouraging, right?
And, at that point, it can feel like the answer is to shift directions. To choose something new — somewhere you can distinguish yourself, be different.
And yet, Minkkinen would say, you actually should do the exact opposite. To understand why, he gives a parable about Helsinki’s main bus station:
“There are two dozen platforms there, he explains, with several different bus lines departing from each one – and for the first part of the journey, each bus leaving from any given platform takes the same route through the city as all the others, making identical stops.
“Think of each stop as representing one year of your career, Minkkinen advises photography students.”
In the first few years of your career or your creative practice, you will be on the same route through the city as anyone else. Every single bus goes through the same stops in downtown Helsinki, after all.
The first one, three, or five stops (or years, in this parable) of your work will feel derivative.
Generic. Uninteresting. Perhaps boring.
But the solution? “Stay on the bus. Stay on the fucking bus,” Minkkinen says. Why?
“A little farther out on their journeys through the city, Helsinki’s bus routes diverge, plunging off to unique destinations as they head through the suburbs and into the countryside beyond. *That’s* where the distinctive work begins. But it begins at all only for those who can muster the patience to immerse themselves in the earlier stage – the trial-and-error phase of copying others, learning new skills, and accumulating experience.”
…
And as Burkeman points out: this doesn’t just apply to creative work. It applies to anything where we put in time to deepen our skills and insight.
A relationship, for example. Or at a job of any kind.
Often, the most transcendent possibilities for that relationship, job, or creative work come when we have sat on that fucking bus through all the stops through urban Helsinki, and finally reach the original, spacious, profoundly unique countryside beyond.
As always, I’m rooting for you. You’ve got this.
Katie
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