In the midst of our word play we might stand before a creative risk, a jeopardy, to be faced directly or shied away from … where the game requires quite another level of meaning. ~Paul Matthews
Creativity Prompt #6: An Interesting Paradox | 30-Day Creativity Challenge
Joyful Mountain Landscape by Paul Klee
Day 6, and we’re going to talk about how limitations can be paradoxically playful, and how that serves our creative capacity. The exercise is oddly simple but not easy. I will be curious to see how it goes for you.
For me, these kinds of exercises produce various results on a time-by-time basis, but the cumulative benefits of repeating such exercises for more than a decade now have been immeasurable. That’s why, when my MFA program required us to write and deliver a lecture to peers and faculty in order to graduate, I chose the topic of play, and I specifically examined the value of literary constraints as a form of playfulness on the page (especially for writers dealing with traumatic topics). I later revised and published that lecture as a craft essay called “From Play to Peril & Beyond: How Literary Constraints Unleash Truer Truths” in Cleaver Magazine a few years ago.
I myself first stumbled into play as a form of literary magic about fifteen years ago during a very unconventional writing workshop. I tell the story of that workshop in the Cleaver piece, so I won’t take time here to repeat it, but I do wish to share with you an excerpt from Paul Matthews’s Sing Me the Creation on the topic of play:
The Troubadours in the South of France in the 12th century played a literary question and answer game called the “jeu-parti”—the “divided game.” From this comes our [English] word “jeopardy,” meaning danger. It is a marvelous root—that in the midst of our word play we might be confronted unexpectedly by a real question so that our whole being stands before a creative risk, a jeopardy, to be faced directly or shied away from … where suddenly the game requires quite another level of meaning. Such moments in the writing nearly always have something of the question, “Who are you” buried inside them. Without that fundamental question, in fact, no real conversation is possible, and yet we spend so much of our lives talking about other things in order to avoid it. When, however, that question is faced, the possibility of poetry arises.
I’ve seen this exact process countless times when leading writing workshops in person, as participants write to highly specific prompts alone or in collaboration with a partner or small group. The combination of playfulness and constraints bring forth the most unusual, captivating and sometimes even breathtaking images, sentences, and scenes.
Brenda Miller, revered writer of flash and hybrid work (if you’ve not yet read “Swerve” or “We Regret to Inform You,” you are in for a treat) teaches with constraints, as well. She apparently uses one exercise in which students first do five minutes of subject-verb-object sentences followed by ten minutes of linking sentences then a longer, twenty minutes spent writing one continuous run-on sentence.
When interviewed by Susan Bruns Rowe for Creative Nonfiction, Miller said, about this highly prescriptive writing exercise:
It’s an interesting paradox. Sometimes, the more constraints we give ourselves, the more fun we can have. Think about the rules of a sport or a game: while a free-for-all may sound like fun, we often prefer to have rules and guidelines, and to see how much creativity and mastery we can accomplish within those guidelines. For these particular exercises (which were taught to me by the artist and writer Nancy Canyon), the rules give your intellectual mind something to concentrate on, and then your subconscious mind can come out to play. The time limit quiets the inner censor and forces you to keep writing whatever comes out.
For today’s writing exercise, we’re going to play with a few constraints that can shake up the sound of our own voices, create unexpected juxtaposition of words, and reawaken our ear for language and our sense for image.
The exercises are clear and simple, but not necessarily easy. If creative frustration arises, ask yourself if you can push through it for just 5 or 10 minutes in order to see what happens. Take a loose, carefree approach with these. You’re not trying to earn a Pushcart Prize. You’re just playing around on the chance that you might, even slightly, deepen your belief in the unending mystery of human language.