Roadblocks, Restrictions, and Other Helpful Things

— What if “impediments” don’t disrupt but merely disguise the creative process? —

“Restriction breeds invention!”

While fielding audience questions at a public reading a few weeks back, the deeply gifted fiction writer Ethan Canin remarked thusly on the usefulness of limitations—and even roadblocks—for any fiction writer. This, of course, is an idea all creative souls can seize upon.

Canin, author of the now classic 1988 short story collection Emperor of the Air (his auspicious debut at age 28), was talking about restriction in terms both of the nitty-gritty components of a short story and the overall circumstances of a writer’s life.

A teacher at the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop, Canin said he’s fond of prompting his students to write a short story that will “make the reader cry over a pair of socks”—a supreme example of creative restriction. He’s always surprised and delighted by the results.

Some years ago I read an interview with Canin in which he advocated a regimen likewise dependent upon restriction. He claimed he deliberately restricted himself to one half-hour per day of writing time. (A measly half-hour?!) The amount of productivity generated by so minuscule an allowance, he said, was astonishing.

This calls to mind some comments by another fine contemporary author, Annie Proulx, from a 2003 reading in San Francisco. Proulx restricts herself creatively by deliberately avoiding all regimens. Much like Canin, rather than bemoaning the scarcity of time, she embraces it and lets it augment her energies. But unlike Canin, Proulx works scattershot. She’s done this so long she knows no other way:

I don’t have a regular writing regimen. I write whenever I can get the time—and usually it’s a matter of shoehorning some work in somewhere or it doesn’t happen. I’ll write if I wake up at 2:00 a.m., and I often do. … I’ve never kept a set writing schedule. That sounds really bad to me.

Naturally, Proulx is an extreme example. Not everybody can be so dedicated as to relinquish structure entirely. But she makes a helpful point, underlining the main one here.

As Canin’s notion goes, imposed limitation—in ideas or images, as well as in actual time to create—can galvanize the imagination in ways that, paradoxically, the writer given unlimited creative freedom may seldom experience. (Canin’s own widely read story, “Accountant,” itself revolves around a peculiarly moving pair of socks.)

This notion is not new, of course. The timeworn adage “Resistance sparks the flame” suggests something similar. But such ideas have fallen out of fashion in a present contemporary moment geared toward job obsession, live-work lifestyles, and all-or-nothing dispositions in most endeavors.

The great lot of us, I’ll venture to say, have always got an idea or two simmering on the back burner—but tend to despair of ever realizing them. Our creative sweat and tears, we feel, are sucked dry in making a living. Our time is gobbled up “on the clock” at work. We embody the modern dichotomy of creative energy at odds with practical demands, and we get … well, depressed. Working for the buck, we feel we’ve been coerced into betrayal of our own more creative impulses. Our guilt induces inertia.

But how liberating to think that “distractions,” “creative roadblocks,” and the scarcity of time may prove in many ways beneficial to imaginative production—and not strictly detrimental as many a creative soul tends to believe.

Writing about art back in 1932, the great American thinker John Dewey suggested this very thing. Where Canin’s key term is “restriction,” Dewey prefers “resistance,” but his gist is much the same:

Resistance accumulates energy … The resistance offered to immediate expression of emotion is precisely that which compels it to assume rhythmic form.

In other words, it is resistance to its production that makes good art good. (The rarity of unadulterated inspiration notwithstanding.) Dewey goes on to invoke Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s term, “salutary antagonism,” a beautiful term we might usefully substitute for the more negative “creative roadblock.”

And here I’m reminded of a delightful snippet from Wallace Stegner’s novel Crossing to Safety:

He said he understood that I was into a second novel. How did that go? I told him: Slow and hard. Good, he said. Hard writing makes easy reading.

How inspiring, helpful, and certainly reassuring are these outmoded perspectives for anybody frustrated by an abundance of back burner ideas and lack of front burner “space” to implement them. And I daresay that’s most of us.

It’s hard work we do whenever we seek to raise an idea from the dark recesses of germination into the light of day. No matter the freedoms or constraints of our circumstances, such work is always hard—it was never really meant to be easy.

So maybe our cramped schedules and day-to-day errands are not the enemies to creativity we suppose, but in fact allies in disguise (“salutary antagonisms” perhaps). Maybe our back burner simmers away all the while, reducing the sauce to gourmet richness. The key, of course, is to keep one’s eyes on that pot. Why not spend the little time we’re spared stirring the sauce, rather than stewing in frustration? It just may surprise us what a few turns of the whisk can yield.

In coming weeks, I’ll further explore this subject of Restriction as it pertains to creative life, beginning next week with more John Dewey.

Till then, simmer and stir.

You may also enjoy:

“Working Without Working”

“Four Ways to Unleash New Ideas”

“Two Books to Encourage & Console Creatives”

“Secrets of Creative Longevity”

“A Message to Those Aspiring to Blend Meaning and Money”

“The Lonely Novelist’s Five Point Productivity Plan”

“Knuckling Down to the Hard Work of Writing”

“Are You An Amateur? Why Not?”

“Nourishing the Creative Impulse”