Constrained Creativity
This will be the first in a series or perhaps a continuum of posts that are less like a short story and more like observations about the world around me and the strange little creatures that inhabit it called humans. Most writers are people watchers, and people watchers see things from a different perspective. That outside eye allows the beholder to evaluate aspects that the individual may never see about themselves. I want to share some of the things I have learned by observing the world, some of the gems that help me write and some of the techniques that I use to be more productive and live a less stressed out life, no matter what comes my way.
The first concept I want to talk about is something I call Constrained Creativity. Conventional wisdom suggests that the goal is to remove distractions and free your mind so that you can “let the creative juices flow”. To some, if even the tiniest snag stands between them and a perfect creative moment (if such a thing exists) then the whole process shuts down. I am here to tell you that this is all in your head. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a problem or that you can easily get past it.
What I have observed, tested and found works amazingly well is rather than freeing your mind and opening yourself up, you should create roadblocks. I know, it sounds crazy but limitations, not freedoms are the key to imagination. Just like a small child, grounded and stuck in his room, those four walls are what gives his imagination true power. I will give you two real world examples of how well this works, then return to the craft of writing and explain how I apply it to myself.
The first example is from the engineers at Volkswagon. The car manufacturing giant doesn’t just make Jettas, they also own a list of brands that may surprise you: Audi, Bentley, Lamborghini, Porsche, and overseas-brands SEAT and Skoda. This particular tale comes from when they acquired one of the finest names in luxury driving, Bugatti. The VW team was tasked with a seemingly impossible job, here is the direct quote from their website listing the challenge put to their engineers when creating the Veyron:
“They were to create a car like none before. Their declared objective was a serial production vehicle able to hold its own on the Formula 1 racetrack and provide a relaxed, yet exciting driving experience in everyday traffic.“
Wether you are a gearhead or not I think you can appreciate the perceived impossibility of the task, but given an almost limitless budget they accomplished just that. Accepting nothing that didn’t meet with the strictest of standards they were able to create a vehicle like no other on the road today. In the process huge leaps were made in various technologies including but not limited to: Aerodynamics, Fuel Pump Capacity, Direct-shift Transmissions, Hydraulics, and the land speed record for a production car (reaching 400 km/h). New innovations that are now available for VW to use in their entire product line thanks to telling a group of engineers to create something that the world, and indeed conventional logic said couldn’t be done.
The second example I want to share with you involves one of the most recognized names in technology and innovation, a man who has touched and shaped the lives of more people than arguably any other in our time, Steve Jobs. Despite his entrepreneurial spirit and contributions to the technology we rely on every day, Steve Jobs was neither a software genius nor a hardware and electronics guru. He was a design guy, that was his passion. He designed form factors, interfaces and user experiences. He was all about how people would interact with their technology and he left it to teams of engineers to figure out how to make the technology that would satisfy those needs. He had a knack for speaking with engineers and knew that at the core they were problem solvers, you don’t give a problem solver a blank slate to create something.
You box them in, you limit them… you Constrain them. That is how you get their best work. Jobs would design interfaces and cases for devices that don’t exist yet and give his engineers a specification list. The device must fit in a case this big and do these jobs and look like this and the battery must last this long and so on and so forth. At first engineers would fight back and say that it can’t be done, but in time they learned to trust him. Eventually the idea of working for someone who could really challenge them led to the creation of some of the most amazing technology that we use everyday. The core technologies are ever evolving but it was the miniaturization of technology, the form factors, the software and more than anything, the user experiences that were all affected by his challenges.
Now that you have seen some real world examples of Constrained Creativity, how can you apply that to writing, or enforce these rules on yourself? Like all skills, mastery takes discipline and methodology may differ from individual to individual, but I will walk you through my own process. Some people will tell you to write every day, Sylvester Stallone writes 1500 words every day, he says that 90% of what comes out is absolute crap but the other 10% makes him millions of dollars. I personally do not write as a career, I write as a hobby so I will only sit down to write when I am feeling inspired. Thankfully that happens often enough for me, I can get the spark fairly easily as long as I am committed and disciplined enough to follow through on it and put in the work.
I use a lot of notes and programs outside of the basic word processor to do my writing, one of my favourites is called Evernote (not a plug I swear). It is a simple note/memo program but it shares seamlessly between all of my devices. I use Evernote to list upcoming “what if?” style writing prompts. I have an ongoing list and sometimes my inspired writing moment comes in the form of new “what if?” ideas, Evernote is always with me so that I can add the new one to the list and cross out completed stories. I add in a layer of Constrained Creativity and discipline here too. I write stories in the same order that the writing prompts were written into Evernote. If I see a story three spots down on the list that I want to write about now, I have to wait until the other stories come out first.
This keeps me from skipping story ideas just because they are difficult or challenging and forces me to tackle subjects that I may not yet know how to convert into a compelling story. In the process of being taken outside of my comfort zone, I learn something new every time and becoming a better writer for it. The brain is a muscle and writing is its feat of strength. You can’t expect that muscle to improve if you don’t challenge it.
Reading deeper into my stories you will learn that each one also has an added personal challenge. The story Mental Prototype was written without a single word of dialog as a test. To reverse the challenge I wrote The Cost of Love entirely in dialog, there isn’t a single word outside of quotes, not even a “he said” prompt. That forced me to figure out how to do something complex like a Mis-En-Scene without the benefit of a narrator. In that case the solution was to start off with a speaker at a conference, this allowed me to get a lot of explanation out of the way in his opening speech. All of my future dialog benefited from the practice of removing the he said/she said dialog prompts as well. If you craft your dialog well the reader should never need to be told who is talking.
These challenges have fostered my writing skill and given me new tools to use, improving all of my future work from that point on. So, today’s observation is, if you want to improve creativity, the best move is not to open the flood gates and remove all limitations. Challenge yourself, be disciplined and assign yourself a task that you don’t think yourself capable of. You will be amazed what you area able to do when someone tell you that you can’t… even if that someone, is you.
Go forth and create.
Multiversal Yarns 