The Messy Middle: Finding Beauty in Creative Struggle
My students are currently midway through my food photography online course, PCS Academy. During our Easter break, I sent them an email titled ‘The Messy Middle’—a phrase borrowed from a book I only heard about, but its title perfectly encapsulates much of what I’ve experienced as a creative.
“The Messy Middle” refers to that challenging phase when the initial excitement of starting a project has worn off, but meaningful results haven’t yet materialised. This concept, drawn from psychology, perfectly describes the creative journey.
While sending that email, I expected some recognition from my students—after all, creative struggles are universal. What I didn’t anticipate was the overwhelming flood of responses sharing deeply personal creative challenges and uncertainties.
This unexpected outpouring revealed that many food photographers silently wrestle with similar struggles, often believing they’re alone in their experience. What began as a simple check-in email has evolved into this blog post—a space to address the creative Pandora’s box we’ve collectively opened and share my 3 strategies that might help navigate these difficult passages.
Behind Content Creation
On social media, we all have the ability to cherry-pick what we share. We all experience seasons of doubt and creative paralysis—it just doesn’t show up in our feeds. We remain oblivious to others’ circumstances, making it easier to form assumptions and feel more alone in our struggles.
What you see in my finished work is simply a dignified vision of my internal creative mess—filtered through the camera and tidied to perfection before sharing. And because I do share the neurosis of perfectionism, I’m particularly inclined to feeling stuck.
For example, right now I’m investing significant energy into my online course, which leaves me struggling to find the creative force to post on Instagram or even photograph for pleasure. In these circumstances, I need nourishment and fun. Yet when I open Instagram, it seems everyone is operating at 100%, and it’s an assumption that could easily trigger a downward spiral.
I don’t believe in the constant pressure to immediately resurrect from our hardships, it’s perfectly okay to fully experience our creative misery without rushing into a pret-a-partager mode (this trend of making every problem an inspirational motif right from the bat). Nevertheless I have developed some convictions that have become genuine tools for me—and I hope they can support you too.
Three Ways to Rebuild Your Relationship with Creativity
1. Gift Yourself Creative Limits
Time or resource constraints can be powerful allies. There’s too much of nothing important sometimes, but we feel we have to have it all. Instead, creativity loves constraints because it’s a problem-solving force; when smothered with endless possibilities, it becomes a bored brat just like a child who has all the toys and doesn’t want to reason.
For example, not having enough space to shoot when I started became my strength, developing my signature flat-lays, because I simply didn’t have any other angle available. When you have less, there is also less to worry about, and your focus sharpens.
A powerful exercise is to see what you can create within strict limitations: a limited amount of time, one camera angle, and one ingredient. For example, give yourself 45 minutes with just one ingredient and some props that look similar—like a variety of glasses and some ice cream. Using similar props ensures you end up with a consistent look, whatever you do.
2. Walk Off the Path
Gwendoline Christie (I’m obsessed with her) said in an interview with Bella Freud, “There’s so much more if we go outside of our immediate, make ourselves a little bit uncomfortable… go into the place where we feel might not be relevant, might not be interesting… You have to look and look again and again and again.”
We have quirks and oddities to our human stories that are far more interesting than another perfect cake. Those are the places people connect with us, and where we reconnect with our creativity and abilities. Sometimes it’s the unexpected, what we think we should hide, the imperfections that make a photo alive.
With all the tutorials on how to make perfect mock ice creams that don’t melt, here I am making a full production (these images are part of a story for a client) with real ice cream that beautifully melted right away.
Personally, something like fake ice cream bores me, because I don’t feel I have anything to add to it, or to do with it. I cannot take it anywhere with me in the way I shoot a story. It’s not my way, but maybe it’s yours. You need to find your own odd way.
3. Embrace Repetition
I deeply believe the rush to find new ideas can overshadow the importance of the creative process itself. This process—which involves exploration, experimentation, and iteration—is crucial for developing any idea. In this journey, repetition becomes creativity’s greatest ally. You can see this clearly in artists like Vanessa Beecroft or Yayoi Kusama. They repeat their process, allowing it to evolve and become increasingly charismatic with each iteration.
To me, this is the most important aspect to cultivate, and it’s how I’ve learned everything. It’s different from consistency—it’s literally taking a concept we love, experimenting with it repeatedly, deepening our understanding within the comfort of something already working for us, and making it better and better each time.
I use repetition on the same story too, especially when I like something. I start to play with it and see how many different ways I can look at it and shoot it, and every time I learn something more about the possibilities of styling and storytelling, like with this melting ice cream.
What This Means for Us Creatives
It’s important to acknowledge to ourselves that there are moments when we cannot be creative in the way we want, as creativity is a finite resource. Life-changing events, building a new aspect of our business, unexpected occurrences—all can drain our creative wells. Sometimes determination needs to leave space for balance and the peace of mind that comes from knowing we are doing our best.
Rather than seeing creative blocks as failures, struggles can be invitations to deeper understanding. If we listen to them, these struggles themselves become our teachers. Do we need rest? Reconnection? The important thing is not to start identifying our worth with the negative feelings we attach to the struggle. Struggles are not fun, but are physiological necessities for growth. When my kids learned to walk, they struggled first, then they learned, they struggled more, then they improved. So we can see struggles as moments of stretching our resources rather than a completely negative experience. It’s painful building a muscle at the gym… I’m telling you what I tell myself btw, hopefully doesn’t sound pretentious.
In next week’s newsletter, I’ll talk about specific approaches to storytelling in food styling that I’m teaching in my online course, PCS Academy. But for now, I would like to know more about your own creative process. What are your oddities and quirks? Are you experiencing “the messy middle” in your current work?
Like always, stay on your creative path, the world needs to see the beauty only you bring!
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