Inside the box

Jane Austen advised that when writing a novel, “three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on.”

Matsuo Basho’s haikus are powerful truths, delicately painted with 17 carefully chosen syllables.

Shakespeare’s sonnets comprise 154* existential conundrums – established, then resolved in just twelve lines and a rhyming couplet. All corseted by iambic pentameter.

We tend to think of creative types as wafting, ethereal beatniks looking for boundaries to casually ignore. However, most significant innovation takes place in the squeeziest of spaces.

That’s because creativity is really about problem solving. To solve a problem, you must first define it.

Say you asked me around to your place for a sophisticated, if socially distanced, candlelit dinner. (Why, thank you. I’d be delighted.)

The menu possibilities appear endless when the only stated limitation is that your creations be edible. You’d be forgiven for seeing this kind of open slather as the ultimate blank canvas.

But given that we haven’t known each other long, you haven’t ascertained whether I avoid animal products or have cultural or religious dietary requirements. What if I have life-threatening allergies? You’d also have no idea what my views are on cilantro**.

Now, in an effort to cover your bases, you’re forced to stick with something safe. (Read tasteless and, quite frankly, unappetising.) 

Conversely, one of the best dinner parties I’ve ever attended was hosted by a vegetarian couple catering to the dietary needs of guests who were gluten and dairy free. Once the resident chef knew what was off-limits, she also knew exactly what she had to work with. She went completely nuts, serving up three scrumptious courses. (Actually, now I think about it, there were no nuts either.)

It may seem counterintuitive, but restrictions set the creative mind free. In fact, boundaries create certain conditions that are essential to the creative process:

#1 Relief from the tyranny of choice

Anything one creates – whether it be written, painted, filmed, or carved from a block of aged cheddar - represents a series of choices: What is it? Who’s it for? What’s it trying to say? What do we want people to feel once they’ve experienced it? What do we want them to do as a result?

As a copywriter, whether your brief is handed to you by a strategist, you take one directly from your client, or you set one for yourself, when you finally sit down to write, it helps that those big choices have already been penciled in.

For starters, it saves you from blank page syndrome – which is no small thing.

#2 Focus

Tight restrictions allow you to explore something deeply, rather than broadly. This concentrates your message, making it more compelling and persuasive. Scraping yourself thinly over a wider area only results in saying nothing much about anything.

If I asked you, for example, to write a short story about your entire dating history, I’d get a puddle-depth look at each ill-fated romance. Ask you about the one who broke your heart in high school and I’ll soon be drowning with you in an ocean of sorrow. (I’ll fetch the Ben & Jerry’s, you go and grab two spoons.)

#3 Pressure

I’m not sure anyone ever created much from a place of total comfort. Necessity, as they say, is the mother of all invention. Deadlines, space, budget, one’s reputation – these kinds of mild stresses help motivate us to find a solution.

Call it the MacGyver Effect – when your very survival is at stake, you too could probably find a way to save the world using only a wad of chewing gum and paperclip.

#4 Agreement

This is specific to those of us who create things for a client, but there is nothing more frustrating than someone who “knows what they want when they see it”. The prognosis for that project is death by one thousand drafts.

Setting the limits from the outset means a) you know where you're going and b) everyone is starting out on the same page. That means there’s a far greater chance the thing you end up with looks largely like the picture on the box your client was sold on.

If you’re still not convinced that constraints serve to increase creativity, consider this shortest of stories, which legend attributes to Ernest Hemingway:

For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.

If the exquisite tragedy of those six words doesn’t just cut you off at the knees… well, I guess we were never going to be friends, were we?

*Technically numbers 99, 126 and 145 broke with this pattern. What can I say? The man was a rebel.

**For the record, I love cilantro (we tend to call it 'coriander' here in Australia). I say go for it.

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