This may not be the kind of limit the OP had in mind, but the old Hays Code put a lot of restrictions on what filmmakers could show on screen. So, they couldn’t shoot scenes showing graphic sex or violence.
A limit? Sure- but sometimes, this limit forced directors to get creative and find ways to suggest or imply what happened, and this was sometimes more effective than explicit scenes.
A commonly cited example would be John Ford’s “The Searchers.” We never see the naked, mutilated body of John Wayne’s niece (who had been kidnapped by Commanches), but the expression on Wayne’s face and the way he screamed, “What do you want me to do, draw you a picture???” conveyed the truth just the same.
Medieval art worked the same way as well. Our model of the creative process is the blank canvas; you can create anything you want. The medieval model was a box of bits of glass and stone and you have to make a mosaic out of it. Given the former, anyone can look creative, because you can do anything. In the latter model, you’re limited by the shapes and colors of the pieces at hand. To shiine in that context is to really display creativity.
You can see this especially in their literature, where the ideal isn’t originality, it’s reliance on authority. What’s cherished isn’t what you create out of whole cloth, it’s what you can do with the pre-existing characters and plot.
want “genius” from me , and I CAN be extremely creative… then give me a dead line.
I need a way to express the joy of finding the perfect (insert product here) by 4pm friday…
i will not even think about it until 2 pm friday… by 3:30 P M i am finishing up the powerpoint slides…
and it WILL be very very good…
worst thing you can ask me is "come up wityh “X”, and then tell me to get back to you when I do…
It isn’t just art, either. Austrian School economists say that entrepreneurship flourishes at its finest amidst market restraints. Restraints against pollution, for example. If government allows certain minimal levels of pollution, then there is no incentive to produce anything better. But if there had to be a way to produce things without so much as a wiff of smoke, entrepreneurs would find it (by commissioning inventors and engineers) what with necessity being the mother of invention, and all that. Creativity would be an advantage.
There is a caveat, however. Frivolous restraints against entrepreneurship itself (like onerous taxes, or legislation favoring one company over another) stifle the innovations that would otherwise occur.
I randomly started clicking around Wikipedia a few months ago, looking for things on this same topic. I remember finding out about a book written with no verbs at all, and a bunch of other fun stuff.
In the old Soviet Union, painters were under restrictions as to subject matter & technique.
What they did to express themselves was remarkable.
I saw one such painting on display in our State Museum–a portrait of an old man with dispairing eyes. The artist had used lighting to make it appear absolutely 3 dimensional, & they had to put up railings & a guard to keep people from trying to touch it. I almost did myself.
Serial music – especially integral serialism, which stretched the precompositional process to overarching, forbidding dimensions.
Anything associated with the enormously influential group OuLiPo (of which Georges Perec, Jacques Roubaud, Raymond Queneau were members, as was “honorary” retroactive member Ray Roussel). Favorite examples include Roubaud’s ε (the title is actually supposed to be the other style of lower-case epsilon, which I can’t find in the character map I have – the one used to indicate set membership in set theory, not the Hilbert-style one used above for something I can’t remember) and Perec’s La vie : mode d’emploi.
Works by those inspired by the playful formal constraints classified and exploited by members of the above group, like Christian Bök (in, e.g., Eunoia).
Oooh, good one: I second everything you said. I am always working right up until deadlines, but I have never missed one and my work is always top-quality. For example, I’m carrying a 3.8 GPA in grad school right now (that one damned “B”!) even though it’s not unusual at all for me to finish writing a paper the afternoon that it’s due. Deadlines are good for me.
I noticed an interesting example of this today on the kids’ menu at our local pancake house. Usually there’s an outlined picture to color, or a blank space in which I could draw a picture for the baby of one of the two things I think I can draw - a flower and a silly smiley face. On this menu, however, there were three squiggly lines, spaced about three inches apart and at different angles. “Connect the lines to make a picture!” read the instructions.
Hmm. If I’m not “allowed” to draw my signature flower and silly smiley face, and there’s nothing here to color, what do I do? I have no choice but to be more creative than I usually would.
So the top squiggle became the top of some fluffy clouds, and the bottom squiggle was transformed into some hills, and the middle slantwise squiggle became the neck of a curious stegosaurus eating one of “my” flowers.
My daughter loved it, and I was shocked to find that I can draw other stuff. Wouldn’t have figured it out without those squiggly lines limiting my drawing space.
I can’t remember for sure where I saw it, but Joe Haldeman and Jane Yolen, two SF authors who are more known for their prose than their poetry, exchanged some writing challenges online. They set varying constraints on each other and the challenger also had to write a poem conforming to the rules of the challenge. One would say something like, “The poem must have a meter; no blank verse. You have to use the words oleaginous, putrid, and stamen.” They came up with some very cool stuff that way. I think that making new challenges for the other, the competition, and the restrictions placed on the form of the poem or the vocabulary boosted their creativity. People like playing games. Restrictions, whether artificial or intrinsic, make solving a problem a little bit like a game.
Come to think of it, you see this kind of fascination at work with all kinds of human behavior. It’s not just a literary convention that romantic love benefits from obstacles to feed it. People do in fact have emotional responses to overcoming an obstacle between them and the object of their affection. I’ve felt it, and I’m sure most of you have too. Sometimes long-distance relationships fall apart when you can actually see the person whenever you want to. And there’s nothing more sure to push a teenager toward a relationship than forbidding him or her to see that person. Everyone who has read Romeo and Juliet knows that this observation of behavior was held to be true in Shakespeare’s time (and way before his time, when the story of Pyramus and Thisbe was first told) and it’s just as true now.
Just about any writer can tell you that a deadline, arbitrary or not, is necessary or nothing would ever be “finished”. Books can be endlessly tweaked and revised. Tolkein spent decades on Lord of the Rings, and never finished the Silmarillion. Writing without editing or other restrictions is obviously not very good either. Take two popular, halfway decent writers: Stephen King’s re-written books are inevitably worse than his original, more edited, versions. J.K. Rowlings’ early Harry Potter books are tighter and move much, much faster than her later books, which suffer from a severe lack of editing due to her powerhouse bestseller status in my opinion.
I’ve found a bunch of applicable quotes though none are the original one I was thinking of. You’ll have to forgive the formatting; I’m short on time and just copy/pasting.
“Perhaps giving oneself a tight structure, making limitations for oneself, squeezes out new substance where you least expect it”, Doris Lessing, “the golden notebook” (Preface), , Flamingo, 1972, p.10
I would contend that the constraints of form are spurs to the imagination: that they are in fact the chief producers of imagination", George Szirtes, Poetry, Feb 2006
“form isn’t a container (of content) but rather a rule for generating a possible ‘next move’”, Foreman, “How to write a play”, p.229
“on the simplest level, form functions for any poet as a kind of scaffold from which the poem can be constructed. Stravinsky maintained that only in art could one be freed by the imposition of more rules, perhaps because these rules limit the field of possibilities and escort us rapidly beyond the selection of tools and media to laying the first stone of the work itself.” ?
“The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution” -
