Though it may seem counterintuitive, one of the most effective tools for generating new work or pushing stories to the next level is to impose creative constraints on them. Poetry is often taught by introducing students to rigidly structured forms like sonnets, villanelles, and haiku. Prose writers would be well-served by learning from this approach. What may begin as an arbitrary rule can redefine the work and push the author into making difficult artistic choices.  The best known examples of these kinds of constraints come from the Oulipo movement; Georges Perec’s novel A Void famously does not use the letter ‘e’ (nor does the English translation of it) and Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style collects 99 retellings of the same story, each in a different style. One can imagine infinite variations on formal restrictions: every sentence must be a question mark, every chapter must hit an exact word or syllable count, the story must be told in the form of footnotes to an unseen text, and so on. The point is that the author has the opportunity at the start to define their project; the rules create boundaries, a container for the author to fill, eliminating at least one (if not several) confounding variables in the drafting process.

Not every constraint has to be wildly experimental. Most prose writers intuitively understand how point-of-view fundamentally alters any story. In the simplest terms, a 1st person POV is bound by the narrator’s intelligence, temperament, material conditions, and access to information in a way that a 3rd person POV is not. For the writer who is stuck—either at the start of a project or in the frustrating middle—the way to generate momentum may be to think about other restrictions they can apply to the text.

At the recent AWP Conference in Los Angeles, authors Darien Gee, Naomi Cohn, Sharon de la Cruz, and Tom McAllister ran a panel on this topic (moderated by Kathleen Rooney), focused on their own writing practices, offering practical advice for implementing constraints into your work. They also discussed how imposing constraints on students can help them to generate new pieces and add life to their pieces in revision. The following is a roundtable discussion between three of the authors conducted shortly after the conference.

Tom McAllister: First question, let’s start with the obvious. How have you all implemented constraints in your own work? I’ve done so most recently in my book It All Felt Impossible, in which I wrote a short essay for every year of my life, imposing a maximum word count of 1500 per piece. I started this project because I was in the middle of a long dry spell and beginning to panic that I had simply run out of words to write; I needed some specific set of rules to guide me so that I could stop staring at a blank page and feel like I had some momentum again. Have you always practiced writing with constraints, or was it something you did out of necessity or (as in my case) out of desperation?

Darien Hsu Gee: Oh, like Tom, panic and desperation 100%!

I began my writing career as a novelist, so my experience was with 85,000-125,000 word novels. In 2017, I was struggling with a manuscript inspired by true events affecting three generations of women in my matrilineal line. I wrote several drafts but the novel wasn’t coming together. I started telling the story in short bursts and, long story short, ended up with 36 prose poems/micro narratives/short pieces of 250 words or less about five generations of women in my matrilineal line. It wasn’t what I had intended, but constraints led to the form which resulted in an unexpected discovery and gift. These extremely distilled stories became Other Small Histories: Poems, winner of the 2019 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship award. 

Naomi Cohn: My use of constraints grows out of my lived experience with disability and my professional experience providing therapy and other emotional wellness programming. As far as disability—I’m legally blind, due to midlife vision loss. Living with disability means applying loads of ingenuity just to get through the day. Whether you view the constraints as stemming from a body’s limitations (mine can take a max of 2-3 hours of screen time—total—in a day) or from how our society doesn’t always make space for different sorts of bodies, survival means creative responses to constraints. As to therapy—a lot of my work in community settings uses writing and creative play for healing. I started to notice the “constraints” of working in a therapeutic space opened up some amazing writing and creativity in participants. As Darien says, long story short, I started using these tools in my own work—the most recent example being The Braille Encyclopedia, a memoir in brief alphabetical essays and prose poems, about vision loss and re-learning, as an adult, how to read and write. The formal limitation was a way to work in bite-sized chunks my body could tolerate, but also—in the end—aligned nicely with the weirdness of learning my ABCs (this time in braille) in my forties.

TM: The variety of constraints here is really interesting, and I especially like what you’re saying, Naomi, about the physical constraints on an author. Obviously, there’s a wide range of physical conditions that can alter an author’s relationship to their work. I’m thinking too of writers who are parents of young children—not the same as an illness, I know—who by necessity have to write at different times and in different ways because the days of sitting at a computer for 4-5 hours are long, long gone. Maybe people don’t think of that as a constraint in the same way as a word limit or formal choice, but what greater constraint is there on our work than physical reality?

NC: Absolutely, parenting, caregiving, economic necessities—multiple jobs or shift work—what particularly interests me is how writers contending with those constraints find ways to do their work unfettered by the constraints of norms, of there being one correct way to write, and expectations of productivity.

TM: Following up on the previous question, how do you all think about constraints in revision? When I was working on my book, I had friends telling me to just drop the 1500 word limit; they (correctly) argued that it was an arbitrary choice at the start, and now that I had the material on the page, I should free myself and write whatever I wanted. But to me, the concept of 1500 had become central to the project; it was what guided the structure of each piece, in addition to driving what specific details I’d included in the first place. To me, the only way to effectively revise was to treat this once arbitrary rule as if it was a natural law that couldn’t possibly be violated. You can’t just turn off gravity when it’s convenient, you know? What do you all think about removing constraints mid-process and/or using them as tools to help in revising or reimagining your work?

DHG: Every writer is different, and every writing project is different. If you’re in revisions and on a roll, then you do you. But if you’re struggling, consider adding some constraints to help you get out of your own way. For me, two constraints come to mind that can help with revision: 1) a timed revision for a specific word count (i.e. a 300-word piece allows only 10 minutes for the first pass revision) and/or 2) applying a form change (i.e. prose to poetry then back again, a hack inspired by Judith Cofer), also with a timed constraint. The idea here is to get unstuck if you are stuck, and to continue to see what might be possible with the work. The truth is: you can do whatever you want. If sticking with a 250-word constraint helps you reach the finish line, great. If doing so hinders you from moving forward, not great. At this point, after you’ve allowed yourself a chance to see where the work is going and you have a handle on it, I say to trust your writerly instincts and either let the form collapse into something new or stick with it if you know you’re on to something true.

TM: Totally agree, Darien. If you’re the one making up the rules, that means you also get to break them whenever you want, for any reason. Maybe they’re just the tool you need to discover the work you really want to do, and then they outlive their usefulness in the final draft. That said, when I was doing final edits on my book, I was complaining to friends that addressing all the editorial notes was pushing pieces over 1500 words. They all said, “Who cares? The rule was what you needed to get the draft done, just go over.” But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I felt like I’d come so far with it, why not just figure out how to make the cuts I need to in order to stay true to the original project? I’m stubborn, is my point.

NC: Tom—I honor your stubbornness in not busting the constraint in revision! That said, I definitely lean more toward tossing generative rules or adding a new constraint in revision. It’s a way of helping gain perspective.  I say echo echo to you both on trusting your writerly instincts. For me the generative constraint is all about giving my puzzle/logic brain something to do so something weirder or more emotionally honest is allowed to come forward. If that initial constraint doesn’t end up having some deeper link to the material or project, then out it goes. Or, more often, it remains in a project’s DNA.

A general constraint or filter I love in revision is reading work aloud. It’s a way of being true to my poetic roots—paying attention to how words feel in the mouth and body, and to how words sound as well as mean. It also helps me hear whether a piece “sounds like me.”

TM: Yes to reading aloud! It is probably the revision tip I most often repeat to my students, regardless of course or skill level. Even my freshman comp students are sick of hearing me say it.

TM: Another question about generating material. How do you think about various formal constraints and their relation to content? Naomi already touched on this in her first answer, the way The Braille Encyclopedia is structured in part by the content being discussed. I’m thinking too about a piece like Jennifer Lunden’s “Evidence, in Track Changes,” in which she writes an essay about a particularly strange episode of her childhood, but then shares it with her mother, and they have a dialogue in the margins, using Word’s Track Changes tool, about the story she’s telling. The form there is not arbitrary; it’s a way into the material, and it also strangely reproduces the dynamic of a loved one who wants to sit on the sidelines of your story and nitpick and correct and argue.  Do you all do any work where form has been driven by content, or vice versa?

NC: I hadn’t seen that piece of Lunden’s, I love it. I also love it when form and content align, but the truth is I usually bumble around through many revisions before I know what I’m writing about and whether there will be a correspondence between form and content. Maybe this is the place to admit I hate the word “constraint.” I prefer “invitation” or “experiment.” Maybe this comes from working in community settings, where participants with trauma backgrounds are common. It’s important to me to create a sense of safety, which includes not creating a sense of being trapped—even by a word count or a time limit. But to circle back to your question, I love it when the initial generative experiment, the final visible form or structure, and the content all play together; when the constraint or container that perhaps began as an intellectual experiment or puzzle also has a heart or emotional resonance.  That said, right now, I’m struggling with the final form of my current project about birds. My initial draft was in the form of a birder’s “life list,” where I wrote about every bird I’ve encountered in my six decades. It was a productive generative conceit, but it’s clearly not working as a revision organizing principle, and I’m still noodling on what that might be.

TM: I like that reframing of invitation/experiment vs. constraint, Naomi—that may be the main takeaway from this whole conversation. What opportunities can you create for yourself as a writer by thinking differently about the drafting process?

DHG: Sometimes form informs content, sometimes it’s the other way around. Sometimes what you’re working on doesn’t come together until you completely dismantle and reassemble it. Joan Wickersham’s The Suicide Index is a great example of this. In an interview with Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices, she describes struggling with the memoir’s structure for years before discovering the index form. She didn’t start writing with this constraint, but arrived at it after years of grappling with the material.

For me, choosing a form before I begin helps launch my writing—the constraints (I call them “containers”) provide a framework. The form guides me as I work and helps me make decisions. Once I’m done with a draft that’s gone through a few revision passes, I’ll revisit my original intention. Does the form still serve what I’ve written?

Currently, I’m working on a memoir in micro essays about my mother becoming a full-time practicing Buddhist in her 50’s and severing her connection to us. My chosen constraint is 49 essays total, echoing the Buddhist belief that the soul spends 49 days in the bardo after death. This time frame is divided into 7 days, so I’m echoing that form in the early draft with 7 sections of 7 essays each. Another constraint is to create the work as micro prose (300 words or less), but I may loosen this in revision. Constraints/containers help organize my thoughts and writing, and then I stay open to seeing if it still works once the draft is complete.

TM: Containers! Another good way to think about it. Your answer (because it mentions Buddhism, parents, and death) reminded me of a very short and very good book that was driven by a very specific set of rules. In Ruth Ozeki’s The Face: A Time Code the author gives herself the task of staring at her own face in the mirror for three hours, and recording her meditations on what she sees. It’s a simple (and, to me, daunting) idea that leads to incredibly rich reflections on aging, death, family history, race, and more.

TM: Do you all have any favorite constraint-generated books or projects by other authors? Another favorite of mine is Matthew Vollmer’s essay collection inscriptions for headstones, in which Vollmer gives himself a double-constraint: each piece is written as if it’s an epitaph for himself (“Here lies a man who…”) but also the essays are all written as a single, extremely long, discursive sentence, some as long as 3 pages. That book was revelatory for me when I encountered it, just seeing how much fun he was clearly having working with these constraints.

NC: I’ll mention Aaron Angelo’s The Fact of Memory: 114 Ruminations and Fabrications. Angelo gave himself the assignment of writing one piece on each of the words in one of Shakespeare’s sonnets “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes….”. Angelo explains in his author’s note that he rose early and meditated each day before writing. I loved the result, lyrical, inventive, and, somewhat to my surprise, it felt like a well-rounded exploration of a mind and a life.

I also borrowed the procedure for my bird project—instead of meditating on a word, I meditated on a specific bird. Even though my current project feels like a disaster at the moment, following Angelo’s cue has made me a huge fan of meditating or intention setting before writing. There’s a huge power sometimes to intentionally NOT writing.

And while we’re borrowing: anything by Italo Calvino—Invisible Cities, Cosmicomics, If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler. If you’re looking for playful inventiveness, he’s a definite go to.

DHG: Victoria Chang’s Obit, a collection of prose poems that read like newspaper obituaries. Chang uses the obituary form—narrow, justified columns of text—to write not just about people (including herself) who died (literally and metaphorically), but also concepts, objects, and emotions. Also Emily Jungmin Yoon’s chapbook, Ordinary Misfortunes, where several of her prose poems about Korean comfort women during WWII all have the same title, “An Ordinary Misfortune.” It’s a simple constraint—the use of the same title, over and over—to generate multiple stories.

TM: Epitaphs, obituaries—rich texts, it turns out! (sorry for interrupting)

DHG: Joy Williams’ short short story collection, Ninety-Nine Stories of God, also comes to mind. In this case it’s not just numbered stories, but the “title” appears at the bottom of each piece rather than the top—a subtle inversion that changes how readers encounter each piece, making us reconsider the story through the lens of its title only after we’ve experienced it. These small decisions impact how a reader enters into the work, and what they take away from it.

TM: Can you talk about how you’ve used constraints in the classroom? I know Darien has mentioned this a bit above already. What kinds of assignments are you giving? Do you have a favorite that always seems to work? How have students reacted to constraint-based teaching generally?

NC: One I use again and again is an empty frame. I give a time limit: 5-10 minutes. The writers choose what slice of the environment they want to focus on through their frame. I ask them to include something they’ve “caught” in their frame in their piece of writing. One of my favorites was a workshop in which one writer chose to write about their friend’s hand (holding a pen, writing…) Again as mentioned above, I’m often working in contexts that combine creative and therapeutic or healing aims, so the activities aren’t always geared toward generating a “usable” creative product. But you can of course layer in additional directions or invitations to address that.

DHG: Like Naomi, I use the constraint of time—10 minutes for a first draft and 10 minutes for a first revision and another 10 for the second. After that, you can decide what to do next (more time, less time, let go of the constant) but the early generation process constraints are designed to help you get out of your own way and tap into what might want to make itself known in the page sooner rather than later (it’s also a kind of brain training). The prompt is always the way in so it almost doesn’t matter what the prompt is—it’s the key, not the room, so to speak. Students love constraints because it gives them a very clear and specific task versus “anything goes.” Hermit crab hybrid forms are a great way to show students what’s possible by following a specific form or constraint.

TM: Love these, and I’m going to steal everything for my own classes. My favorite exercise in both fiction and nonfiction is to have students write an instruction manual or how-to guide. You can encourage the students to lean in to their expertise, whether it’s in a specific skill, or just a life experience they know all too well. It’s such a malleable form. You can be silly with it (I’m thinking of a student who wrote a really funny guide on how to get fired from your job as a waiter on day 1) or you can use it as an indirect way to approach difficult subject matter (Jennifer Murvin’s “How to Put Your Child to Bed” uses the procedural details as a way of getting into all the big fears about parenting; Jerald Walker’s How to Make a Slave uses the guide as a frame for discussing complex racial issues). The possibilities are limitless.