So recently I've been forcing myself to work with some restrictions. Specifically every one of my latest rough drafts have been short side stories and I've been forcing myself to use only nine chapters (ten with a prologue) for each of these rough drafts. It has put my stories into tiny little boxes that I can easily deal with and decide what is or isn't important for the story in question.
Its been an experiment for me to test out a new method of writing I call module writing, I'll get more into that at a later date. For now I just wanted to say that it is essentially the idea of squeezing the story into a box or series of boxes. If it doesn't fit in the box it might need cut, but the point is the story becomes more concise, and more focused. So far it's been really improving my creativity and spurring on a lot of interesting ideas.
It is still a big restriction though. The last rough draft I finished for example had a lot of creative ideas but it was a real struggle to go through writing it. I'm hoping more than expecting it to come out good, but even if I end up having to revise a lot of it, or worse yet, cut said story out, I still learned some valuable things from it. I don't think I would have come up with some of these ideas had I not forced myself to use these restrictions.
It does has draw backs, for example I'm not sure yet how well this method of writing will work for longer fiction. Writing from multiple view points, or about a larger cast of characters would be a challenge. Since it's still a new method I'm sure I'll find more issues as I go. Still even with these challenges it actually makes me want to write more and harder.
These are just a few thoughts on how restrictions have been helping to cultivate my creativity. Anyone else have any experiences or thoughts to share on how restrictions can help creativity grow?
No comments:
Post a Comment