Three Ways Limits Can Set Your Creativity Free

Instead of thinking of limits as constraints or as obstacles that block your progress toward achieving your goals, start thinking of them as valuable allies.

Lots of great things have been achieved not in spite of limits, but because of them. Particularly when it comes to creativity, setting limits–or having limits set externally upon you–can set you free.

Here are three examples of how limits can expand, instead of constrict, creativity:

Write a Novel or Your Memoir in Six Words

Ernest Hemingway is said to have written the following to prove to a friend that he could write a “novel” in six words: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

Smith Magazine picked up on the concept a couple of years ago and published the book “Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure”. People were asked the following: “Can you describe your life in six words?”  Submissions came pouring in, and the best were selected and included in the book.

Here’s a few from the collection of one thousand mini-memoirs (or nano-memoirs):

• Chef Mario Batali: “Brought it to a boil, often.”
• Singer Amy Winehouse: “Couldn’t cope, so I wrote songs.”
• Graffiti artist Mare 139: “Wasn’t noticed so I painted trains.”
• Nine-year-old Hannah Davies: “Cursed with cancer. Blessed by friends”
• Graham Marsh: “I’m just happy to be here.”
• Bill Cowan: “Age crept up and mugged me.”
• Gillian Smellie: “Ditched the map, found better route.”

The book did so well that SMITH has continued publishing books around the same concept.  You can head on over to their site and contribute your own six-word memoir.  Who knows? It might just get published in a future book.

Here’s the trailer for “It All Changed in an Instant: More Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous & Obscure”, the newest six-word memoir book from the folks at SMITH:

And here’s my six-word memoir: “Life plan: love, laugh, serve, create.”

Write a Best-Seller Using Only Fifty Different Words

One of Dr. Seuss’ most popular books, “Green Eggs and Ham” was the result of his publisher betting him that he couldn’t write a book using only 50 different words. Obviously, he could!  “Green Eggs and Ham” is one of the most popular children’s books ever written.

The 50 words Dr. Seuss used are the following:

a, am, and, anywhere, are, be, boat, box, car, could, dark, do, eat, eggs, fox, goat, good, green, ham, here, house, I, if, in, let, like, may, me, mouse, not, on, or, rain, Sam, say, see, so, thank, that, the, them, there, they, train, tree, try, will, with, would, you

Do you think you wouldn’t like green eggs and ham? As Sam-I-am says:

“Try them! Try them!
And you may.
Try them and you may, I say.”

Six Sentences – Flash Fiction

According to Wikipedia, flash fiction is “fiction of extreme brevity”. A work of flash-fiction contains the classic story elements: protagonist, conflict, obstacles or complications, and resolution. However, because of the limited word length–works of flash fiction tend to be between 300 and 1,000 words long–, sometimes these elements remain unwritten and are just hinted at in the story.

As an example of flash-fiction, the site “Six Sentences” accepts submissions of stories written in–you guessed it–six sentences. The site is doing so well, they’ve published the submissions in two volumes:

• Six Sentences
• 6S, Volume 2
• There’s going to be a volume 3, and they’re accepting submissions until Sunday, January 31st, 2010. (Source).

Conclusion

I actually had a fourth example to share with you, but I decided to limit myself to three.    The next time you’re sitting in front of a blank sheet of paper and you can’t think of a thing to write, start by setting limits for yourself and go on from there.

If you came up with a six-word memoir, please share it in the comments section.

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Image above courtesy of Roopesh.

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