First amaryllis flower bloomed the day after Christmas
The past few days I’ve spent hours and hours writing and working on a project that is near and dear to my heart. And as often happens, the project is morphing and changing every day.
The Mess in the Middle
Starting projects is easy. Finishing them is much more difficult. Last year I began working on a book about choosing joy. I started writing with ease but as time went by more and more time slipped by between my sessions of writing. I wasn’t sure if I had anything more to say. Finding the right photographs was way more difficult than I thought it would be. (You would think that I could find 52 photographs that I liked among the more than 60,000 images in my photo catalogs.)
There is a part of me that just wants to stop and give up on the project. And I CAN stop any time and will still have the joy that I experienced writing and envisioning the work. But I want to give the project at least one more try.
“Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest.”
― Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
My original vision for the project was a book with 52 weekly essays on joy, each essay paired with one of my photographs. But like all projects do, this project has a mind of its own and it has refused to fit into that original vision.
Recently I sat and re-read what I wrote earlier in the year about joy. Reading the words I wrote months ago encouraged me to write more. So I sat down the day after our family Christmas gathering and began reading what I had written, editing, and adding new ideas.
I decided to try using Bookwright from Blurb to begin pairing photos with text from the book and spent hours working on it. But it just wouldn’t work. Was I writing a book about joy or was I expressing joy through my photography? I showed my work to a photographer friend and she immediately told me that I had too many words paired with each photo, the words detracted from the images.
Intentional zoom
Going Deeper
At first I resisted her feedback. My thoughts went something like this, “But I wanted to…, I thought…, darn it, she’s right about the images. Let the image tell the story and convey the meaning. Oh, maybe there are two projects here, one is a book of essays; the other is a book of photos. But that means that I have to dig deeper and let my true self and emotions show through in my photos. Wow, I have a lot of work to do.”
I’m still pondering how to reconcile my original idea with my friend’s feedback, but I spent all morning today, working on a pared down version of a photo book with fewer words and more meaningful images. And I feel like it’s working, but I will need more high quality images. I really cannot find 52 images among my 60,000 plus in my catalogs, that express what I want to express.
“I have never created anything in my life that did not make me feel, at some point or another, like I was the guy who just walked into a fancy ball wearing a homemade lobster costume.”
― Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
So my friends, that is the power of projects. Committing to do a creative project and then following through on it, takes you on a learning journey. Perhaps you will end up creating something, perhaps not. But the journey helps you learn about yourself and your art in ways that don’t happen when you don’t make the effort to go deeper.
Have you also encountered the mess in the middle, during your creative projects my friends? Is it time to return to a creative project or to start a new one?
May you walk in beauty.
The first of my three amaryllis bulbs is in bloom. So I’ve been playing with photographing it in different ways. One of these years I may tire of photographing amaryllis flowers, but not yet.
A layering experiment (with amaryllis flowers and fox) that yielded interesting result
Yesterday afternoon sun on glittering treetops was gorgeous
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