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Thinking outside the box is a thing that Creativity People love to talk about. I use the popular nine-dot exercise myself in anger coaching (of all places!) to illustrate how there is always a creative solution to an impossible task.
But this letter is about thinking inside the box. It's partly inspired by Pat Stokes's book Creativity from Constraints. Stokes's background is in advertising, and she explains how creative work in that field has to take place within the limits of the client's specifications, cost, technical feasibility and so on. Similar restrictions frame any creative work. If you decide to write music for the piano, you'll find you're limited to 88 notes. If you decide to paint in oil on canvas, you are deciding to use oil and to use canvas and you know that there is only so much you can express in that way.
You can be a wildly creative maverick, James Joyce let's say, and you still have to comply with at least some of the established rules if you're going to find a publisher and an audience.
In the last few months I've been doing a lot of work on the topic of Hollywood scriptwriters. After being contracted to work on a couple of research projects on that subject I'm now preparing to do a huge slab of my own research in the same area. And in studying screenwriting I realize for the first time, after decades at the movies, how very constrained it is.
There is so much you can not do in a movie. All those techniques you read about in books while you were procrastinating on writing your screenplay - act structure, plot points, foreshadowing, all the stuff Aristotle said 2,500 years ago about writing for a very different medium - they aren't just useful or professional-looking, they're the only way to do it. I'm exaggerating but I'm right: there are only 88 keys on the moviemaker's piano.
Luckily it turns out that 88 is enough. But when you make the decision to write a movie, you make the decision not to be writing a novel, not to be writing a poem, and to use a movie-writer's methods.
Creativity is hard to define, but one thing that quite a lot of Creativity People seem to agree on is that creative activity leads to a product that is "original and useful." And that's what I'm saying. Yes, what you produce as a creative writer has to be new, has to be different from what everyone else has written before. But it can't be so new that it doesn't fit and is irrelevant. When you set out to write a novel, something recognizable as a novel is what you'd better be writing, or who's going to publish it?
If it's a groundbreaking work that goes beyond this year's hit novel, that's great. But it needs to be similar enough. Only then can critics understand what kind of novel it is and say "this groundbreaking work goes beyond this year's hit novel!"
So what I'm saying this week is that every creative action occurs within some kind of framework. Every creative action solves some particular problem, if you prefer. Doesn't just happen out of nowhere and for no reason. Welcome the framework, let it be the context within which you do your unique thing.
Something to try this week: how would you plant ten trees in five rows of four trees each? There is no catch, it's only a matter of layout.
Oh... you wanted to do some writing? Well, decide what writing it's going to be. Just for this week, take those crazy people seriously who say you should outline and outline and know where you're going and how long the product will be and what your point is and exactly how many words you want to write in a day and precisely what time of day it will happen. Play by the rules and by your own plan. Just for this week, then back to reality and see which you prefer.
David
David Jung McGarva
+1 (818) 707 1871
Write me: david at todayiwrite dot com
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