Hiya, writers and frenz. :)
TBH, I can’t recall if I’ve posted on this before, but I think the challenge is pretty good practice, so let’s forge on ahead!
According to some theories, productivity flows best when there are no limits on what the writer can put on “the page” nor how long to take to do it.
Raise your hand if you’ve found that that’s not foolproof either.
Limits challenge us [sorry] to find new ways around’em. Like the novelist who wrote an entire book without once applying a pronoun to the protagonist? Or the author who wrote an entire book without once using the letter “e”. (I don’t recall their names but I bet someone reading this does.)
In a different area where creativity has to be always on tap, I have a recollection I can share:
— from age about 9 to 22 I was in a semi-pro youth folkdance troupe, first just as a kid performer, studied a bunch, eventually ended up choreographer before I aged out. We performed for charitable & intercultural groups, old-age homes, schools, public holidays, stuff like that. Besides rehearsals, classes, fundraising, costuming on a shoestring, and all that jazz that went on in order to be able to do it, there was an annual north American competition that groups like that had to compete to qualify to get into, and sometimes professional jobs came out of that! But even anyway, it was exciting as hell! Emotional, sweaty, sore muscles, the occasional actual injury (some doctor of an NYC ballet company wrote a book called Dance is a Contact Sport), pizza out the ears, and no sleep. Fun all around!
The year that stands out was when a troupe of religious kids came to compete. Girls and guys never touched hands, far less bodies. But … amazing thing: they gave a wondrously romantic, deeply emotional performance that stunned all the other groups and everyone there to silence — and then on our feet cheering and applauding like mad!
That performance was unique. Different from what all the rest of us were doing. Unexpected. Incredibly communicative. And, as you can tell, inspiring.
Their choreographer, a non-religious professional, said, “limits make you have to be more creative, to get around them. A wide open field doesn’t demand that.”
Books are limited in having only words to run a movie in our heads.
Television has to reach outa that usually-small box to grab us in the full-size world. Television and film have only sight and sound, yet we come away feeling as if all our sense were involved.
And once upon a time, both television and film had only black and white and shades of gray in between, yet they exerted tremendous power!
More limits that drive creativity:
📌 All around the world people growing food have limits: too much water or too little, soil that sucks, pests including humans who wreck ‘n’ steal. They come up with ways to grow food more creative than farmers with better conditions … because they have to.
📌 Diplomats have limits: they have to keep all kinds of details in mind, and a cool enough head and set personal feelings aside enough to keep talking continuing, so there’s negotiations and agreements instead of a wall of silence and maybe doing each other damage.
📌 Doctors and nurses have limits in trying to save and heal lives: not only whether there are medical supplies enough but has medical science advanced far enough.
📌 Parents have limits: they can’t see inside their kids’ heads, and they’re always short on sleep!
📌 Little kids have limits: they’re littler than everyone else!!!
In WO, sometimes the diarist says, “keep it below 200 words,” on top of what the rest of the challenge is. The times we can manage it, what a kick! But of course, every challenge includes limits — the topic, usually: limit yerself to that!
Writers with a contract have editors to answer to, and that’s a boatload of limits right there. Like when the editor says, “cut at least 10percent — this draft is too long for the story it tells” or the editor says, “these 2 secondary characters are unnecessary to the story, give their scenes to other characters and write these ones out,” or “this draft is too short for the story, flesh it out by 20%!”
It’s probably accurate to say the the idea behind the Rule of Twenty is a limit that generates creativity and originality: that limit is, discard the first nineteen ideas you get for turning some premise into a novel…
Whatever the starting point, everyone comes up with the same first 5 or 10 ideas. Aware or not, they draw upon so-familiar ones from books, film, television — like those plotlines telegraphed a mile off by writers trawling the shallows and treading the ruts. (Some views are that this meets a ritual kind of reading/viewing need. But that’s for a whole separate diary/discussion.)
Up at 10 and 15, we’re getting well past commonplaces toward uncharted regions and roads less traveled. (Not in this sentence of mine, alas, but still.)
At 20 starts “territory peculiarly yours,” where unique images, realities and complexities percolate.
And as writers, we usually put all kinds of limits on our characters. What they then do to cope makes them seem to be creative themselves, yet really it’s us. We do it to make them interesting and worth taking the journey with. Here in WO, don’t we make them tramp the length and breadth of Togwogmagog, mostly on foot and footsore one way or another, searching its halls, caves, tunnels, towers, villages, towns, taprooms, and courts, seeking that durn pimpernel Jewel. With no electronic devices or surveillances or other fancy spy tech to speak of? Magic is good, sure, but it has its limits too. ...or there would be no story at all worth telling. Far less reading. Limits make the characters have to try all kindsa things. Ad try harder.
Okay, you’ve got the picture by now, and then some, probly! :D
So here’s tonight’s challenge and it’s DIY if you like:
Come up a limitation —something you’d otherwise allow yourself, maybe without ever thinking about it — and then write at least 250 words (fiction or non, your choice) including dialogue, while abiding by that limit.
Alternatively: write those at-least 250-incl’g-dialogue, limited by one or more of the following:
- no “the”:
- No sentences can be started with a pronoun, a proper noun, or a character’s name;
- No complete sentences in dialogue. (Lotsa people don’t speak in complete sentences, so this is pretty realistic.)
- All dialogue, no narrative except in the dialogue ‘tags’.
- Epistolary form;
- One side only of a private phone call (narrative allowed).
- A phone call in public in which at least one speaker has to use metaphor or other disguised terms so no one overhearing will understand what the call is really about — narrative allowed.
- Second-person POV
- Not English words alone, at least 2 other languages whose words are used at least 15 times total, as few repeats as possible.
- English language, someone else’s grammar.
- Focus on a character but with only indirect description, e.g., no narrator saying, “They were tall”,“ “she had charisma,” “attractive” “ugly” etc. — keep narrator observations out.
- Something hazardous happening in nearly total darkness, nothing for light, that characters have no choice but cope with.
Why “at least 250 words”? ‘Cos it gets harder to do the longer ya go on. Yes, I am ebil! As an eyeball guide, the above blockquote is 205 words, or use the wordcounter linked at the first AT LEAST.
Write On! will be a regular Thursday night diary (8 pm Eastern, 5 pm Pacific) until it isn’t.
Before signing a contract with any agent or publisher, please be sure to check them out on Preditors and Editors (at FB their last post seems to be in October 2023) Absolute Write, Critters.org, and/or Writer Beware.