I’d be a pretty rotten curator of writing craft advice if I didn’t leap at the opportunity to share some writing craft wisdom that kicked my own butt. Amy Stewart’s recent observation that “ruminating leads to more ruminating” changed the shape of my entire day today. Instead of sitting down to, ah, ruminate on a writing project, I’m sitting down with a goal in mind: to explore constraints.
Savvy writers know that confining a story to one milieu helps turn up the tension. “Try to find one arena for the story,” writes John Truby in The Anatomy of Genres: How Story Forms Explain How the World Works. “This allows you to create the pressure cooker within a confined space. Too much time or change of locations let pressure escape.”
This principle of confinement is as beneficial to writers as it is to stories. I’ve long guided writers deeper into their creative vision by urging them to embrace its constraints. “Constraints, far from being opposed to creativity, make creativity possible,” maintains cognitive scientist Margaret Boden. “Random processes lead to first time curiosities, not radical surprises.”
Constraints actually sharpen creativity. Boundaries force you to seek clever solutions—thinking inside the box, not outside it. Embracing constraints as a natural product of the creative process positions you to discover innovations you might’ve missed given unlimited options.
This is why my writing session later today will be light on endless ruminating and blue sky thinking. No more “thinking outside the box” for me. That big dark box over there in the corner? That’s where I’ll be, deep inside, happily bumping and bumbling into its parameters.
In this issue of The Writes of Fiction:
- Exploring the creative decision matrix
- What kind of book should you write?
- Characters can just know things
- Tropes: The good, the bad, and the ugly
Understanding how stories work changes everything. I’ll show you how to back up your creative instincts so your ideas hit home. Ready to get serious about your book? Apply to work with me.