When I first moved to Canada, long before Instagram existed, I started a photoblog. I went out every Saturday with my digital camera, and I took photos of the pigeons fluttering around Bathurst station, the ice waves on the shore of Lake Ontario, the scowling crowds on King Street. I’d try subway stops I’d never been to, walk farther than I would without a camera in my hand.
But it was a photoblog, and that meant I posted one photo every day. And then obsessively looked to see if anyone had commented on the photo. Almost always, no one had reacted at all. Every time was one more drop in the bucket of disappointment. After about a year, when the bucket was too full to ignore, I stopped exploring the city and instead I started trying to figure out the magic formula. There were lots of Toronto photoblogs with twenty, thirty comments a day, and I felt sure I could crack the code.
So my photos stopped being about what I was interested in, and started being about what I thought people wanted to see. I’d see something fascinating and lift my camera up, and then lower it, thinking, no one wants to see this. Your ideas are stupid, no wonder no one likes your photoblog.
I spent hours and hours looking for a better camera I couldn’t afford, convinced a higher pixel count would help. The photos lost the spark they’d had when I’d begun. Sure, they were more polished, more careful, but to what end? In my quest to get comments instead of create photos I loved, my photos started looking just like everyone else’s. And still no one commented on any of the photos I posted. Eventually I gave up. Not just on the photoblog, but on taking photos entirely. And I’m sad about that. There are years and years of living in this strange and wonderful and terrible city that I could have documented and I didn’t.
About a year ago we moved to a new apartment. It had just been renovated, so my usual decorating method of “buy bold paint colors and paint all the walls” felt nerve-wracking. I wondered if putting photos on the wall was the solution. I hadn’t taken photos of the city in such a long time, but what if I just… took photos for us? Me, my partner, our son? What if, instead of trying to fit some kind of algorithm, I went outside and took photos of brutalist buildings, and rainy nights, and the way the grass and the brick building and the sky combined to make a magical 1980s color-block almost-illustration?
So that’s what I did. Turns out I can get photographic prints at a local camera shop and in a Dollarama frame each 8″x10″ photo costs about $10 Canadian (50 cents American). Turns out that these days when I go outside and look at Toronto with a photographer’s eye, what’s important is the moment I want to see every day inside my apartment.
What does all of this have to do with writing? Two things, actually.
It bleeds over. That feeling. Pleasing myself with the photo of the warm lights of the building next door and the lowering storm clouds overhead. Never considering whether or not anyone else will like it. My best writing is, without exception, the stories I want to read but no one else has written them, so what other choice do I have? I write them myself.
And the other reason, which is a creative endeavor with the lowest stakes possible. I care profoundly about my writing. My goals are lofty and I’m on track to accomplish them in the next few years. Which means that even when I’m doing my best work, I’m still thinking constantly about how the story I’m writing will help me meet my writing goals.
But the stakes for the photographs couldn’t be lower. I’ve put five photos on the wall. So far I like them. My intention is to add photos until there’s no space left, until the apartment looks like one of those Regency Era rooms, every inch filled with a frame. Maybe in a year the photos that are up right now won’t be as special to me. Maybe I’ll move them somewhere else. Maybe I’ll replace them. All of these options feel possible, and all of them are totally fine with me. It’s a relief, a creative outlet that doesn’t matter.
So. How can you apply this to your own life?
Find that creative thing you love that has nothing to do with writing. Make the stakes as low as you can. Pursue it with joy.
Why read alone when you can read with friends?
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