My friend and mentor, Aimee Bender, and I have had many conversations over the years on the art of the constraint: you make up a rule and then write around that constraint. As George Orwell wrote in 1984, there is freedom in slavery and slavery in freedom and having a rule is basically an artistic slavery of the mind.
You submit yourself to the rule and in so doing, you liberate yourself from the pain of the struggle that comes with the overwhelming freedom of making an infinite number of choices from an infinite number of options.
Think about wearing a school uniform. It’s absolutely awful in so many ways, especially if you care about your own sense of style like I do, but it is also ironically very liberating because there’s so much less to think about. When I was a piano major at Interlochen Arts Academy, I could only wear navy blue and light blue. At Loyola Academy, I had to dress like a prep. In both situations, I adapted to the rules, learned a lot about my own personal style, found creative ways to respond to those rules, & afterwards actually appreciated the time I saved only being able to consider a few outfit combinations. As far as the writing process is concerned, having a rule greatly simplifies the creative process in ways that might genuinely surprise you.
When I mention having a rule in your own writing, it could be as simple as “no adverbs” or “no revisions” or “no subordinate clauses” or “only one adjective per noun” or “write each sentence like Hemingway with one subject one verb and one direct/indirect object” or “ignore the rules of punctuation” or “avoid emotive states and focus exclusively on character physicality” or “no backstory allowed” or “tell a story using only dialogue.” The potential rules you could create for yourself to work on your writing are almost infinite, but each constraint brings with it a particular focus and a particular blur, something you really prioritize and something you elect to ignore for the time being. And the things you learn, the things you produce in your own writing by creating a rule and then following it religiously can be extraordinary. I have, for example, learned to use stronger verbs after I placed the no-adverbs constraint on my writing for the whole day. I’ve learned to use the physicality-only rule to flesh out characters through action, downplay backstory, understand who my characters are through the way they express their personhood through their bodies, & help readers keep track of my characters in space and time. I’ve learned the merits of word economy after limiting nouns to a singular adjective. Each rule offers you the potential for insight into your own craft.
The point is, rules help writers acquire temporary skills they didn’t know they had until they were forced to use them while learning in real time about their own writing and ideational tendencies. If I follow the “no subordinate clauses” rule for the day, suddenly my sentences becomes cleaner but I also become hyper-aware of my tendency to go off in my writing and riff the hell out of my sentences by virtue of the fact that I can no longer write that way. My rule prevents me from writing the way I normally write. After every road block, I understand just a tiny bit more how I drive my own language.
So, it’s not just the acquirable skills that are important with using a rule but also the self-knowledge that comes from suddenly not being able to write the way we normally write.
Time is another constraint. Though most writers don’t think of time that way, it is and has always been a constraint and can be incredibly useful if used in the right way to inspire creativity, adaptation, regularity, and self-application through scarcity. In this context, temporal scarcity. Part of this is just straight neuroscience: I don’t know about you, but if you pay me a $100,000 to write a speculative space opera sometime in the next 10 years, I’ll probably write six books in that time, but none of them will probably be speculative. But, if you paid me $50,000 to write 100 pages in a year and another $50,000 to finish the novel in another six months, I can almost guarantee you I’d finish that book in three months. That’s just how my brain works.
Too much time is a problem. Not enough time should be but rarely is for most artists in the zone. I think artists should use time intentionally to bring out the best performance, efficiency, & work ethic in their own creative projects because I’ve found it incredibly useful whether it was at my MFA or PhD programs or during my Sparks Fellowships at Notre Dame.
In my own life, I have less than two weeks before my training begins at Fidelity as a High-Net-Worth Associate. Less than two weeks. For most writers, that’s not enough time even to do anything, not even write a short-story. But for me, it’ll probably be exactly the time I need to make hardcopy revisions of Dizzie & Moto, release a new piano EP, & query a few agents. Part of my motivation is psychological: time will go by faster if I’m busy but also, I might not be able to release a new EP or dive into my newest manuscripts for a while as I’m adapting to a new rigorous work schedule that will limit my free time and throttle my creative energy and simultaneously inspire and harness my analytical skills in finance.
Eventually I’ll work it all out. I always do. But first I have to learn and master my new job. Then, I’ll know how much time and energy I have to work on my newest manuscripts and publish them when the time is right. So, I’ll use this time constraint I’ve got right now to help me streamline my summer projects and help me jump into my new job with a running start.