Loving Limits

In Blockbusters and Balancing Acts, I celebrate many kinds of limits as a way of focusing creativity. Set a timer; use random input; read off topic.

Length is one of my favorite limits. I adore short forms — sonnets, flash fiction, the pithy Harper’s Index, the 140-character Twitter Tweet. The experience of writing my first short story for The First Line was almost magical; at the time the magazine required not only that their provided first line be used, but that the story itself be no more than 600 words. This forced an economy of not only words, but characters. Peripheral characters casually introduced early in the story of necessity became pivotal as the story wrapped up. In my case this lead to a surprising twist that “made” the story. So, yeah.

Because I love short forms, I came with delight to Liz Danzico’s and Khoi Vinh’s publishing baby, A Brief Message, which publishes brief — as in just 200-words — “briefs” on design. The most recent as of this posting is by Paul Ford, of Harper’s Magazine and Ftrain, “No Resistence is Futile.” Ford has me in the first six words but by the end of his exhortation to add constraints, the item that has most piqued my curiosity is his novel use of tools:

Now when I face a new writing project, I open a spreadsheet. I want a grid to keep track of sources and dates, or to make certain that the timeline of a story makes sense. The grid imposes brevity. Relationships between sentences are exposed. Editing becomes a more explicit act of sorting, shuffling, balancing paragraphs.

Next time you are in pursuit of another bit of software/productivity pørn, you needn’t look further than your Office suite. It worked for David Byrne, after all.