Create with more restrictions
Finishing projects, counting words, and remembering how to kick.
When I started this newsletter in 2021, the year Larry King died, I didn’t have any parameters in mind beyond wanting to share the writing advice I had learned. In time, I developed internal categories for different types of letters and found out what topics I do and do not like to cover. Overall, though, this letter is allowed to be whatever I want it to be.
On and off, for nearly four years, however, I have struggled with wanting every letter to contain as much depth as possible. My draft pages contain a massive excess of ideas as I trail off and link to new topics, getting far afield from whatever I had intended to be the point. There’s value in this approach, and writing a multitude more words than you end up using is generally a great practice for essay writers. But the danger here, as has often been the case for me, is allowing perfectionism to prevent you from ever publishing anything. My most egregious example was writing 13,000 excess words on what ended up being a 600-ish word letter. For that particular piece, I had a draft that was ready to publish, but because I could not stop tweaking it and adding more and more, I ended up sitting on it for a year, not publishing any letters, and completely changing the topic by the time it came out.
There’s a scene in the popular superhero manga My Hero Academia where the main character, Deku, is training. The series’ premise is that he inherited a superstrength power from a Superman-esque figure, but his body can’t keep up with it. He emulates his idol’s fighting style in battles, and for the first section of the series, he ends up bruising and breaking his arms whenever he throws too many punches. In the scene, Deku is racking his brain with the fact the doctor has told him he can’t keep putting that much stress on his arms. About 100 chapters in, over two years of the series being published in real-time, Deku has the revelation that he has legs and can start kicking people to spread out the strain. His idol didn’t tend to kick, so it didn’t occur to him.
All this to say, about a month ago, I remembered that I could give myself word limits when I write these newsletters. With most official writing assignments, you receive an approximate word count to strive for, and for many print publications, there is a hard limit. I’ve been doing this writing-song-and-dance for nearly a decade. I know this; I’ve always known this; if anyone tells you I didn’t know this, I’ll eat their hat and throw their shoes in the garbage. But because I had so enjoyed the freedom of setting the terms of this newsletter, it didn’t occur to me to put that sort of limit on myself.
For months, I had been struggling with how to link two adjacent ideas in a story, but when I gave myself a strict word limit, I realized I didn’t have the space to do both well and ended up pursuing a strong version of just one of the ideas.
As we’ve discussed before, the idea of cutting big and then small is fundamental for making cohesive stories that don’t overflow like a garbage can filled with far too many shoes. There are so many wonderful things that our creative projects can be from the outset, but to the dismay of anyone around the age of 27, we do, unfortunately, have to make decisions at some point. Restrictions can help with that.
I was a big fan of the now-defunct podcast Story Break. At the start of each episode, they would pick a weird topic like Lincoln Logs, an obscure pop culture franchise, or a random Wikipedia article and then set a one-hour timer. With the firm restrictions of the topic and the hour, they would attempt a complete story treatment (an outline/summary) of what a feature film on that topic would look like. Anytime they’d get lost in the minutia, they’d look at the time remaining, firmly lock in a decision, and move on. While the final product was often goofy and unpolished, by the end of each episode, they would have a concrete and compelling story that could evolve into something more. With 60 short minutes, they would manage miracles like turning Duke Nukem, a horrible little vestige of the worst parts of 90’s culture, into an emotionally propulsive protagonist.
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It is a difficult sweet spot to hit, and many of us also need to learn the opposite lesson of allowing our creative streams to flow freely, but it is critical to find what type of restrictions bring out our most fulfilling creativity. Experiment with placing physical limits on the tools you can use, the time you can take, and the places you create. And while I’d love to go on, I’m bound to hit my word limit any second now. So until next time, never forget that when it comes to writing, never do a—
Word limit: 850
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