The Helsinki Bus Station Theory
Stay on the f*king bus
Reading time: 5 min
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The Helsinki Bus Station Theory is a popular metaphor used by the Finnish photographer Arno Rafael Minkkinen to explain the artistic journey towards originality.
It is powerful.
It is true.
And I live by it.
“Georges Braque has said that out of limited means, new forms emerge. I say, we find out what we will do by knowing what we will not do.”
How we deal with Originality
Within my writing group, we are all at different stages of our writing careers—we’ve got one self-published author, one traditionally published and two unpublished at their first manuscript—but now, in the summer of 2022, we are all placing the final marks on a novel. At our last meeting, after the second pint, one of them asked me what I thought about originality.
He said that by reading his work in progress, he could place and remember exactly where every single scene came from. Some of them came from his experience, some of them from historical events, some of them from biographies and some of them from other novels. He said he didn’t even know if writing this way was allowed.
This brought me back to the time when I started writing. I had read a handful of classics and scribbled a couple of poems, and yet I was sure I was going to do something that had never been done before. I was going to be totally original.
The originality problem is a striking one, especially at the beginning, when your exposure to art is too little to realise you’ve been copying someone else’s work, which was heavily influenced by someone else’s work (repeat this sentence as many times as you want) and is usually solved by saying that true originality doesn’t exist.
The best book on—not—being original I’ve ever read is probably Steal Like an Artist, by Austin Kleon, and although his advice is great, it doesn’t really cover the second stage of an artist’s life.
How do I find my own voice?
Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash
“So, our best chance of making our voice and vision heard is to find that common attribute by which the work can be recognized, by which audiences are made curious. It can happen early, as my teacher Harry Callahan stated it: you never get much better than your first important works. And they come soon.”
Let’s say you followed Austin’s advice, and you’ve been working on something for years. You’ve embraced the spirit of not being original, at least not totally, but now you want to be, if nothing else, yourself. How do you do that?
That’s where the Helsinki bus station theory comes in handy.
The Helsinki bus station Theory
Photo by Tom Brunberg on Unsplash
Arno refers to a specific, real bus station in Finland’s capital, with at least two-dozen platforms. From the station, buses reach out of Helsinki, but for the first kilometre or so, they all take the same route. Referring specifically to photographers—but easily extendable to every other artist—Arno compares each stop to a year in the artistic life of one of his students. If after three years, three stops, let’s say, and with a solid body of work, the student goes to a gallery or to an expert with his pictures, he will probably be compared to someone else who did what he was trying to do, only better.
That’s the moment of truth. If after this first failure the student jumps out of the bus, takes a cab and goes back to the station to catch another bus, three years from now, he’ll be in the same situation. That’s because the first stops are shared by every single line out of Helsinki. Most lines don’t diverge before five or six stops, and get further and further away from each other the more they proceed.
So, how do you find your own voice? To Arno, this is very simple.
Stay on the f*cking bus.
The beauty of it is that, once you get far enough from the central station, the entire line becomes yours, and not only you can claim it, but now your early work, the one which was criticised for sharing a “stop” with other artists, becomes valuable. It becomes part of the process.
Stay on the F*cking bus
Last Sunday I went out for dinner with my old classmates from high school, thirteen years after our last day together. It has been a beautiful night, and I had forgotten how much I loved them all, even the ones I never reach out to, and during the dinner I asked everyone how they were doing. As you might expect, most of them were doing ok, some not so much, and some were doing great.
The ones who are doing great—either at work or in relationships—are the ones who stayed on the bus.
If you hate the journey, by all means, jump off the bus, you deserve it and you can catch another one, but if you have chosen your line and you like it, stick with it. You’re not going to see the result until the bus stops at the other end of the line.
Alla prossima.
Photo by Juan Encalada on Unsplash
