When I teach closed form poetry, I’ll often use a clip from Taskmaster, a British TV show that features celebrities (primarily comedians) competing in a series of often ridiculous challenges.
Each task has specific rules, and most of the time there’s always some time pressure element, and that can lead to some spectacular failures, but the imposed limitations can also lead to really inventive, outside-of-the-box thinking, like in this clip.
It’s a reminder of the ways in which creativity can thrive and benefit from constraint.
“In limits, there is freedom. Creativity thrives within structure.” - Julia Cameron
Constraint can play a role in the form of the work itself, the container of a specific story structure or closed poetic form. While these forms can feel too restrictive and can be problematic if approached as the only structure a story or poem should follow, working within a more constrained form can challenge writers to come up with more creative, inventive ideas. As Alan Lindsay and Candace Bergstrom write, “What is called closed form poetry is an organization of language that adds more than common rigidity to language and then tries to create the maximum possible freedom—or openness—within that space. Closed form is an obstacle course for the poet to run language through as gracefully as possible.”
I think this idea can apply to story structures too, the way in which a writer might work with and adhere to a well-known narrative structure but then within that find a similar kind of freedom or openness and even ways to surprise the reader from within an expected or well-known form.
It may also be that the form or structure or frame that constrains your work isn’t modelled on the Hero’s or the Heroine’s Journey or Freytag’s Pyramid or one of the six basic story types. I consider myself a structure-based (let’s be honest, structure-obsessed) writer, with my process involving outlining on a macro level and then outlining the micro beats of each scene before I can start drafting that section.
And yet if I try and impose an external narrative structure model too early in my process, I become incredibly frustrated, feeling like I’m forcing what I know to be true about the story into someone else’s conceptual frame. I’m creating a constraint, a frame to hold the story, but it’s one that feels intuitive and like it’s coming from the narrative itself rather than something external I’m imposing onto it.
Of course, while I do this work, I’m unconsciously pulling on what I know of narrative structure and the shape of stories from my craft reading plus all the stories I’ve read and viewed and listened to, but I find often that’s the way writing craft works best: learning and engaging with the ideas, making notes, practicing concepts through exercises, etc., and then trusting all that information is there at the back of my mind without trying too hard to literally force the concepts into the work as I’m drafting.
I also find that I think about the frame I’m creating or the organizational work I’m doing as pattern-making, seeing the connections between scenes, the way certain moments later in the story echo earlier ones, and the use of repetition and variation. Pattern is something Jane Alison explores in Meander, Spiral, Explode, illustrating how rather than the traditional narrative arc, forward momentum can be created through patterns or forms found in nature, such as waves, spirals, fractals and meanders.
“We writers go about our observing, imagining lives, moving onwards day by day but always alert to patterns—ways in which experience shapes itself, ways we can replicate its shape with words.” - Jane Alison
The image I most often hold in my mind is a thread, one that has a beginning point and end point, but which isn’t contained to a straight, escalating line. Instead, it’s a thread that creates other spaces and shapes, that digresses and meanders and loops back on itself, and that knots and binds together the key moments of the narratives. There’s still constraint, there’s still a frame, but it’s one that stresses the interconnectedness and complexity of what’s held within it.
This idea of constraint or structure can be applied to our creative process as well as our creative works. Writers will often set a specific word count or time limit for their sessions because it helps in building a sustainable practice and holding space in our days for the work and finding some consistency within a process that often offers such uncertainty.
In this piece for Literary Hub, Dashiel Carrera writes about being an anxious writer and how “the anxiety of writing is the anxiety of possibility.” The constraint of using a timer and forcing himself to hit a certain word count before the alarm went off allowed him to get out of his own way and move forward rather than backtracking and obsessing over what could be.
A timer can bring more focus and clarity to our work—we might push just that little harder when the tick, tick, tick of the clock reminds us that time is limited. There can be an almost breathless quality to our work in those moments, the sense of rushing against the clock to get to the endpoint that has suddenly come into focus for the scene or section you’re working on, an energy that’s often felt in the writing itself too.
The constraint of time or a specific word count can also help us hold the work and make it feel less overwhelming. When the writing is a struggle, knowing that your minimum commitment is 15 minutes or 100 words can be a relief, and often once you’re inside the work rather than on the outside thinking about it, you can and do want to continue writing.
With a long project and/or a piece that demands a great deal emotionally, these kinds of constraints can also be helpful too, allowing you to show up fully for the time or word count you’ve set, but also with an awareness that the piece can be held within that space and not consume everything.
“The routine is as much a part of the creative process as the lightning bolt of inspiration, maybe more.” - Twyla Tharp
As with so much else connected with the creative process, what types of constraints or structures or containers will be unique to you, and they may vary depending on where you are in the process or which project you’re working on. It may also be that in some periods of your creative life the constraints feel more necessary than others.
It can take some exploration and experimentation to find what you need at a particular point in the process, and then consistently checking in with yourself to see if the constraint feels helpful or too restrictive, whether it is energy-giving rather than feeling like it’s draining all the energy from your creative work.
Photo credits:
Photo by Joshua: https://www.pexels.com/photo/empty-cathedral-135018/
Photo by Jess Bailey Designs: https://www.pexels.com/photo/macro-photography-of-spider-web-3663314/
