You are an artist. Congratulations.
This means you must regularly walk into your studio or sit at your desk and confront artistry’s oldest enemy: the blank canvas. Of course, the word “canvas” is an abstraction, a shortcut, representing anything from an actual canvas to a pile of wool and fabric, a slab of marble, a hunk of rough-hewn wood, a wet mound of clay, or, in this case, a blank sheet of paper.
What to do? Walk away?
That is certainly a solution, but it’s a short-term fix. The paper will still be there, staring dumbly up at the ceiling when you return to your desk weeks or months later. Unlike you, it has the patience to just sit there, waiting. Waiting until you curl up and die from the shame of it, in all likelihood.
But you’re more clever than that. You know how to solve this problem.
Just write anything.
It could be complete nonsense. It could be your thoughts on writing complete nonsense. It could be your thoughts on some stranger on the internet telling you to write complete nonsense. It doesn’t matter.
Just do it fast, without thinking about it. It will probably be garbage, but that’s OK. At least the page is full now.
Flex your fingers and rub that crick out of your neck. Sip your tea while you read back over your work. It isn’t pretty, but you’ll live to fight this fight another day.
If you keep this up, odds are, one day, you’ll write something that isn’t garbage. Maybe your high school teacher will read it, and you’ll feel good. That’s good. Keep it up.
But now, a new complication. You’ve written some things-that-aren’t-garbage, and someone (perhaps it was only you) liked it enough to compel you to do it again. That means you still have to sit at the same desk in the same chair and lock eyes with the same old blank page. Like an infestation or disease, it won’t stay defeated for long.
A familiar problem demands a familiar solution, does it not? Just keep writing garbage until you find the not-garbage that made it worthwhile. What made your first not-garbage so satisfying? Maybe try tapping into that again. Or don’t. Regardless, you’re going on a hunt for something without quite knowing what it is.
You bring something into the world, you share it, and it either lives or it dies. Or, so says M. John Harrison, noted writer of not-garbage.
Perhaps you can already see it. Stay the course. Just using the winning strategy again. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
In short, stay complicit.
If you’ve ever played more than one round of Three Card Monty, you will learn the golden rule of Three Card Monty: you will never win Three Card Monty.
The things we create when we are at our most creative, our most free, are rarely an expression of freedom. In fact, it is quite the opposite. When you tell yourself you’re going to sit down to make something new, you are almost certainly recycling.
When you write thinking without consciously imposing any rules on yourself, you still write something similar every time. On purpose? Certainly not. There is nothing purposeful in the prompt, “just write anything.” Behind that lazy pseudo-advice are others just like it. “Just be yourself” and “write what you know” are simply slight variations on the theme of “don’t rock the boat.”
You’re subconsciously re-using plot lines, characters, elements, phrases, words. You are probably retelling the same story you told last time, only with a fresh coat of paint. When given the opportunity to be completely limitless, you put the yoke on yourself and plow through the same familiar lines you plowed last year and the year before that.
Surely, we can aspire to create something more than not-garbage. Surely, there is a higher calling among artists than to wage an endless, fruitless battle against paper products using the same threadbare strategy. Surely, we can make something truly fresh and, dare I say, unexpected.
We can make purposeful garbage. We can write what we don’t know.
If you’re looking for advice on the matter of artistic fulfillment, I don’t have much to offer.
But I do have advice on writing and other rigged games.
If you make anything for other people, you’re already in a pickle. You’re surely and completely trapped like a rat in a maze. Only, it is a maze of your own making.
Your habits and biases form the walls, and your harebrained opinions and flights of fancy only occasionally lead you to safety, but we would hardly call that purposeful.
So, what exactly am I proposing? I’m not immune to any of this either, by the way. If I’m ribbing you now, it’s only because I’ve poked and prodded and critiqued myself into the contorted pretzel of contradictions you find me in today.
I’m no expert, in other words.
So, let’s just admit that. Let’s just own up to the fact that this isn’t a perfect process that anyone can magically master and crank out multiple award-winning novels every year, even if that seems possible.
And let’s pretend for a minute that we don’t need that kind of validation.
Let’s also admit that we are trapped. We’re trapped by our choices, opinions, likes and dislikes, hopes and dreams, aspirations and miseries. If we choose to reject them, they will continue to steer our decisions and shape our thinking.
So, let’s just admit it. Given the chance, we will only ever write the things we’re used to writing. We will only ever write in the languages we know or with the words we know. In all likelihood, we will only write the stories we have seen, read, or heard about.
In other words, all of our writing and anybody’s writing is constrained writing.
I’m proposing that we own this and know this without despair or judgment because in this acceptance, I believe we can find freedom.
And what is that freedom? Where can we unearth that true, unbridled creative expression? Why, by taking a conscious part in designing your own prison, of course!
Take part in deciding precisely how constrained your writing is and how you will use those constraints to sharpen your skills and expand your comfort zone. Decide exactly how you want to become a better writer, in other words.
If I’ve lost you, I won’t hold a grudge. But if you’re still reading, I would like to welcome you to your newest obsession: self-imposed limits for fun and profit.
What follows is a sort of sad listicle explaining how you might do just that.
Expanding Your Diction#
Restricting Word Choice#
Are you tired of using the same words over and over again? Then go discover some new ones.
Try writing in lipogram. Dust off that old dictionary and find words that don’t contain that fifth glyph in our Latin script. Who wants it anyway? Toss that soggy, skimpy, crusty, outlaw alpha-bit out of your window and dust your hands off.
Play around with dropping this diphthong for a paragraph or two and try to sound natural. Just try it. It will probably hurt. That’s good. The point is to grow through voluntary struggling.
Now, in an instant, your writing is full of calculation and thrust, that is to say, an aim.
Diversifying Your Sentence Structure#
Restricting Word Repetition#
What if you wrote each word only a single time, even over one paragraph, or for a snatch of dialogue? Which effect would that have on your voice, brevity, and sentence structure? There are, of course, examples to peruse in the wild, such as Never Again by Doug Nufer.
Experimenting With New Plots and Characters Archetypes#
This blog has touched briefly on some novel writing exercises that you can use to develop a story on the fly, but what about taking a deeper dive into the nuts and bolts of what elements show up in your story, when, and where?
The novelist Georges Perec once asked such a question and, through asking it, developed a kind of machine, that is to say, a system for writing narrative fiction. The end result was his masterpiece Life: A User’s Manual.
Life: A User’s Manual, A User’s Manual#
Life follows the story of a Parisian apartment building, its residents, and its history. The narrative structure is built around the conceit that the narrator can see into the building from the street, as if the facade is stripped off so that one could see into each room.
Squares#
Perec’s idea revolved around a puzzle called the Greco-latin square. The puzzle itself is a sort of grid with two letters inside each cell. Each combination of letters is unique. For instance, the combination “AB” should not appear more than once in the grid.
Moreover, the first letters of each cell should only appear in each row and column once. The same follows for the second letters in each cell.
Lists#
Using the solution to one such puzzle, Perec figured he could assign a set of story elements (something he called “a list of obligations”) to each unique pairing. He did this by writing over 40 lists of story elements, including the style of furniture, types of dress, colors, texture, knickknacks, or shapes that must be included in each chapter of his book. This meant that any given cell of a Greco-latin square would provide two story elements, a color and a shape, for instance.
Each list contained 10 items exactly, meaning he had to create solutions to 10x10 greco-latin squares, each representing a single list. Likewise, because he made over 40 lists, that means he solved nearly 20 greco-latin squares.
Prompts#
After painstakingly making a list of lists, that is, a list of every chapter and every “obligation” that should appear in it, Perec was left holding a list of writing prompts for every chapter of a 100-chapter novel.
More to the point, he designed his fictional apartment building to mirror the 10x10 grid he used to construct his prompts. This allowed him to have one list of prompts, that is, a single chapter, representing a single room in the apartment for every apartment in the building.
Each list of prompts for each chapter was utterly unique, largely thanks to the unique nature of greco-latin squares. But now, the question is, in which order should the story be told? Which chapter was to come first, or second, or even last.
Surely, he could have just pointed at his imaginary apartment building and gone sequentially from the basement all the way to the roof, but instead, he decided to add one last twist to his already long list of writing constraints.
Chess#
In order to decide which list of prompts “shows up” in any given chapter, Perec devised a 10x10 chess board and placed upon it a single knight. He then proceeded to solve another puzzle known as the knight’s tour. Knights can only move in an “L” shape, two up and one across, or vice versa. In the knight’s tour, the aim is to use a knight to visit every single square on a chessboard only once. Using the solution to this puzzle, Perec was able to decide which list of prompts was to appear in chapter 1, chapter 2, and so on up to chapter 100 of his novel.
The end result? Surely, you would expect that a story so contorted and constrained as this would be unreadable. Not only is the system of constraints completely invisible, but, to put it simply, the prose is simply overflowing with the kind of excitement and magnetism that would compel a reader to turn the page to see what happens next. In short, it is really, really good writing.
In Closing#
This is an extreme example of how you might challenge yourself to write a novel, but I think it is an important one to note. Critics of constrained writing often look down on the torturous list of rules people create for themselves as inherently stifling to good writing. I’d argue that even with no apparent constraints, people still turn out bad writing every day.
At least with the rules, you can grow as an artist, challenge yourself to pass off artifice as something totally natural (the singular skill in all art, one may argue), and, perhaps, even have some fun.
It sure beats just writing the first thing that comes to your mind.
