Spontaneous vs. generative work

Robert Boice, in his book “Professors as Writers”, explains how spontaneous writing is helpful for getting unblocked, unstuck, and warmed up, which is crucial for establishing a daily writing habits.

However, at some stage, spontaneous writing, as helpful as it is in working around the self-consciousness and self-censorship, becomes counter-productive for precisely that reason: spontaneous work by itself does not produce coherent, finished results. What tis needed at that stage is a healthy dose of what Boice calls generative writing. It is still quite free-form, unconstrained and not particularly concerned with perfection of style and logic, but it is focussed on a particular topic. In order to maintain the flow of ideas, Boice suggests alternating between spontaneous and generative work.

I can see clear parallels between this “academic writer’s” workflow and that of a photographer. Writer’s block is a problem so common, despite the debates of its reality, that books have been written on how to overcome it. In photography, it is equally easy to become paralyzed and never start creative projects because of perfectionism (reluctance to start under imperfect conditions, without “ideal” gear, sufficient time, etc. or reluctance to share less-than-perfect images with others), self-doubt or impatience (rushing to complete the projects and not allowing ourselves to slow down in order to produce better, more significant work).

For photographers, the spontaneous work is carrying a camera (even a phone camera) and shooting everything that we come across and that catches our attention. There should be no goal to eventually share the images with anyone. The practice of observation and of taking photos is the goal in itself.

Then, in order to make tangible developments of our skills, by analogy with the writers in Boice’s book, the photographers would benefit from periodically doing more structured shoots involving more elaborate production. Those could be projects focussed on a particular theme or a technique.

For me personally, the projects involving local dancers or athletes from our university provide opportunities to do generative work. Making sure that spontaneous work is happening on the daily basis is proving to be more challenging.

As a side note, another aspect of photography, which doesn’t readily fall into spontaneous/generative classification is post-processing and development of skills and creative techniques related to it. Perhaps, it similar to some type of supporting work (e.g. referencing) that writers have to to in their craft, and since the the writing craft appears to be fairly well-researched, I am looking forward to learning about it.