I read in an article on Unlocking your creative genius, no less, that “you must give yourself permission to create junk”. Eeeks! Create junk? Why would anyone want to do that? Isn’t the purpose of art to please? Coming from an author I admire, the suggestion struck me as counterintuitive. Creative and junk don’t mix! Or so I thought. But reading further, it all started to make sense. The author was suggesting that when you allow yourself to create more stuff — whatever you love to create, be they paintings, short stories, poems, whatever — without getting too hung up on quality, you will discover in your stuff nuggets of beauty and brilliance. That five-page essay you penned? It might be boring but you will find in it two or three beautifully crafted sentences, pure music to the ears. That is the nature of the creative process. You sift through lots of sand and silt to find nuggets of gold.

… when you allow yourself to create more stuff — whatever you love to create – more paintings, more writings, more poems  — without getting too hung up on quality, you will discover in your stuff nuggets of beauty and brilliance.

That analogy mirrors my own experience pursuing photography. Early in my journey, I would expect all of my images to be breathtaking — well, they certainly looked great in the viewfinder — but they would all turn out flat and uninspiring. Frustrated and discouraged, I almost gave up photography; only my love of the craft prevented me from calling it quits. I resolved to practice and study and learn. And that meant taking lots of pictures and learning from mistakes. Soon, I discovered that among the dozens of images from a photo session — my pile of junk — there were one or two really good images, stunning even. In creating the junk, I was learning about light, about composition, about perspective, and so on, and, on occasion, somewhere in the recesses of my brain, those learnings combined in creative ways to deliver a stunner or two. But the junk had to be created first!

The easy bit is creating junk, the hard bit is making the judgments. Which images to keep? How to judge your own babies?! Do you keep that sunrise image, nearly perfect, except, in the top right corner, high tension wires interrupt the golden yellow sky? What about the image of the young girl with a perfect smile, except, a stray arm intrudes the frame? Keep it? Decisions, decisions. In the beginning, when perfect images are few and far between, throwing out the near-perfect images feels like torture. But as you keep at it, as you keep shooting and learning and playing, the images get better and better, and weeding out the near-perfect ones becomes much easier.

Looking back, the early frustrations appear to have pushed me, unconsciously, to create junk, and the end runs there have been that my images are better now than they have ever been. The hard truth, though, is that the ratio of junk to gems is still much too high, higher than I would like to admit. Paradoxically, that is good news — it keeps me excited to learn and explore, to create more junk, albeit with intentionality, with hope, that some day I may unlock any creative genius within!