I’m writing a piece that’s supposed to help other creative types stop complaining about things getting in their way and start thinking their way around the barriers.
I’m trying to avoid cliches like “the Chinese word for crisis is made up of the words for danger – and opportunity” or “every obstacle is actually an inspiration.”
So I’m brainstorming and trying to come up with examples of creative works that were made better by barriers. By “barriers,” I mean rules, obstacles, difficulties or other impediments that people might bitch about but which end up forcing them to be more creative.
So far, I’m doing a lousy job: my big example is Shakespeare writing all of his plays (except for the crazy people’s dialogue) in iambic pentameter. Also, Beethoven wrote some of his greatest works when he was deaf.
Anyone have any better examples? More specifically, want to share your better examples?
(Just to be clear, I will not quote them or otherwise incorporate your words into something else. I’m looking to spark some ideas.)
But more seriously, and I’m not really sure of this fits in at all with what your doing, but deadlines do it for me. As a matter of fact I spent a couple of hours writing a domestic abuse piece just last night, oh , somewhere around midnight til 2, since I needed the article to finish the newspaper which had to be completely laid out, edited and proofed before I could go home, which I didn’t end up doing until 5am.
Now I’ve had two hours of sleep, having gotten up with the little people at 7, put in a full day of domestic-type duties and am sufficiently delirious to create all sorts of run on sentences. What was the question?
Well this might not be quite what you’re looking for, but at least it’s a mind snack.
Legos or tinkertoys.
They have a built-in obstacle, which is that you can only use them as intended. You can’t possibly make a perfect sphere out of legos. It’s just not gonna happen. Well, I suppose you could get the lego company to make the huge number of special pieces you would need, but that’s not the point.
This limitation forces people to learn other ways… you can, if you try, make something pretty darn close to a sphere out of legos. Heck, you’re on the web, search… you can find pretty much ANYTHING made out of legos!
The limitation of the materials forces the artist to create new ways of using them.
Another one that just came to mind, perhaps more along the lines of what you’re asking for:
Steven Hawking
Perhaps he’d be a genius anyway. I don’t know. But, he’s stuck in a wheelchair with little ability to do anything other than think. He thinks REALLY WELL, apparently, and quite creatively, in his way.
How about the Dogme 95 filmmakers, who set extreme limits on their shooting and then within those confines found astonishing things to do with film? Granted, they set these limitations (shooting on location, no overdubbing, handheld camera only, &c.; read site for more) themselves, but still it led to some fascinating films which almost certainly would not have been made otherwise.
Would Michelangelo count? He had to paint a ceiling in the Sixtine chapel, quite the thankless task if you ask me. Apparently he started on it as a chore, then suddenly got inspired.
Most fugues are arguably the result of a restricted ‘rule’-like system (though most of the rules can be broken at times). Same goes for the sonata-form.
Queneau’s Exercices de style (Exercises in style) consist of a brief and simple story that is retold 99 times, each time in a different style.
The twelve-tone system of Schönberg is an example of a system developed for putting more structure on atonality. Whether it resulted in good works is anybody’s guess.
Frank Lloyd Wright built his Falling Water house on a rock outcropping over a waterfall. This constraint and the one imposed by Wright, that the house exist in harmony with its surroundings, resulted in one of the most inovative houses ever built.
Garry Marshall has a great book about his career and has many stories about how some great bits from his films were done on the fly because something planned didn’t work out.
for instance.
In the film Pretty Woman there is a scene in a fancy restaurant. They only had one day to shoot there and of course there were some costume and hair problems with Julia. (here hair and dress were pretty fancy if you recall) Anyway instead of just sitting around Gary shot some unplanned pick-up shots of the waiter catching the snail shell. Later when she was ready he added a quick shot of the shell popping off her plate and BOOM! You have a really funny moment in the film in an otherwise dry scene.
Zebra reminded me of the famous one from Indianna Jones first film.
There had been scripted a sword and whip fight between Indianna and the sword wielding thug in the marketplace. Anyway when it came time to shoot this Harrison Ford was suffering extreme stomach cramps from something he had eaten. So instead of fighting, the character simply draws his gun and shoots the swordsman.
A day or more of shooting and stunt work turned into a five minute job due to illness of the main character actor. The moment that it created in the film became one of the most important insights into the Indianna Jones character, and a good and memorable peice of humopur.
This is great. Despite a horribly written OP, and the Most. Ungainly. Thread Title. Ever., people are coming up with excellent examples that make me smack my head and curse my own short-sightedness.
Thanks to everyone so far, and keep 'em coming. (I’m especially fond of the FLW and Raiders examples.)
Rhyme in general. Of course we use it because we like the way it sounds, but it also serves as an obstacle to be overcome. When rhyming is too easy to be an obstacle, my impression is that it’s not as popular. For instance, in classical Latin, all the grammar is supplied by word endings that rhyme with each other. It’s almost as easy to rhyme as not to, so Latin poetry doesn’t use rhyme the way English poetry does. And in French, I believe rhyming words aren’t supposed to be the same part of speech, for much the same reason.
Every problem comes with a gift in its hands…. We seek problems because we need their gifts.
Creativity is one of those rare gifts which comes to us not in spite of the obstacles in its way, but because of them. Without obstacles, solutions are not creative, but are mundane responses to a predictable situation.
No one ever got famous painting living rooms beige.
Aren’t there people who have (for sh*ts and giggles) written entire books without using the letter “e”? It’s a self-imposed obstacle, but it certainly would push one’s creativity.
I’m reminded of Robert Frost’s famous contention that “writing poetry that doesn’t rhyme is like playing tennis with the net down.”
Samuel Beckett wanted for his plays such as Waiting for Godot and Endgame a very spare, lean style of writing, but found that he would always write far more than he actually wanted. He cured himself of this by writing the plays originally in French, at which he was far less proficient than English, and then translating his own French into English. The result is a totally distinctive style that works perfectly for his subject matter.
I’m still trying to think of an example that involves limits that were imposed on the artist from the outside, as opposed to self-imposed limitations such as rhyme or fugue form.
The only thing that leaps to mind is independent filmmaking. The lack of a serious budget can lead to inventive ways of getting things done. Sometimes it’s casting your friends in a movie (and finding out that Hey, they can act!); and other times it’s shooting on locations without a permit; the sense of danger can easily transfer into the performances on film.
I’ve had to rewrite several scenes of the film I’m currently working on to accommodate the lack of a budget. For example, I was going to shoot a scene with a bicycle in it, but I don’t have a bike and couldn’t get hold of my neighbor to borrow his, so we shot it without the bicycle and I moved the scene to a different section of the film, and only then did I realize that it was funnier that way and I should have done it that way in the first place.
(I can’t believe I was just pompous enough to discuss myself in the same post with Samuel Beckett.)
When I was but a wee lad, I had an Amiga computer. This was far ahead of its time back in the mid-80s and was very good with music and graphics.
But it could only play 4 voices simultaneously. I set to work entering my favorite orchestral works into the music program for playback, working within the 4-voice constraint. I had to come up with some very clever ways to get the harmonies to sound proper and all that.
Now, one of my main passions in life is doing transcriptions of large orchestral works to be played by a simple string quartet. And I’m pretty good at it, due in large part I think to all the work I did years ago with that old Amiga.
In the early 90s, in England, there was some legislation regarding cigarette advertising. The law said that cigarette ads could not show people or representations of people smoking or even simply looking happy near cigarettes. The result was an amazing flood of award-winning ads. It was actually kind of a problem because instead of making smoking LESS attractive, they accidentally made it MORE attractive because the ads were so creative and memorable.
There were a few articles in Advertising Age about the phenomenon.
Dammit, Bippy, that was the first thing I thought of when I read the OP. And I had this great snippy comment that in the Raiders of the Lost Ark Special Edition, the swordsman was going to shoot first with a walkie talkie!
Anyway, as for creativity with obstacles/limitations, what about the stuff they do on Junkyard Wars? Using “random” junk (I’m not sure if anything gets planted for the teams), I’ve seen some pretty impressive results.
And if you want an example of creativity being used to get around obstacles (instead of using them), there’s Richard Feynman’s famous safecraking exploits during the Manhattan project.
CrankyAsAnOldMan, the most famous book that doesn’t use the letter E is Gadsby by Ernest Vincent Wright. You can read the entire book at that site; it’s not a great book, but it’s an impressive project. Sample (opening sentence):
If you have heard of Evilyn Glennie the modern percussionist you will probably already know that she is profoundly deaf.
I had the good fortune to see her perform live at Windsor Castle. In this performance she did one thing that no hearing musician could do (without either wearing heavy ear protection, or deafening themselves). She played the very large gong (don’t ask me technical names I’m not musical) standing about a foot away from it and in front of it, she kept a rapid beat against it and with each beat the sound became louder and louder. At the climax the noise was loud enough to shake the entire banqueting hall, and quite as loud as anything I have heard at a concert (I am a heavy metal/prog rock fan, I’m not musical). I am sure that had she functioning ears, the volume of the sound would have deafened her at the range she was from that gong.
damn would someone take the p out of my post please