Imagination Under Pressure

PEOPLE generally want more—of everything. More money, more space, more time, more love, more recognition, more fun. Our “more mindset” is spawned by many things: the thirst to maximize our self-fulfillment, the seductions of further pleasures, the abundance of nearly everything one could ever want in America. The desire for more seeps into our expectations of our creative process as well. If you talk to other writers, you’ll likely hear complaints about their lack of time to write. They yearn for a utopian idyll where time is expansive and unfettered, without worries about paying bills, making meals, or working—a pure time to write and nothing else.

I am such a writer. If I had my druthers, I wouldn’t shop for groceries or even put gas in the car. I’d reside in a completely pampered life in which I could wake up and write every day, cushioned from reality—and then, and only then, would I truly realize the resplendency of my creative potential and write the novel of my dreams.

Instead, like most, my writing life is a cramped and hectic affair. I work all day, return home to household chores and parenting duties, and bustle through a weekend of demands, whether it’s taking my kids to birthday parties or doing one of the nagging tasks to keep my house from falling down. I try to wake early in the morning to write for an hour or two before work, but I write mostly within the nooks and crannies of time— during halftime at one of my kids’ soccer games or in a stray moment after work—not in its expansive glories. I suffer from the not-enough blues: not enough time, not enough money.

There’s an old saying that if you argue for your limitations, you get to keep them. My limitations can feel as if the walls of my writing life are closing in on me, but I’ve started to see the constraints of my life as advantages in disguise. I’ve observed many people with time on their hands fritter it away and then have the audacity to complain about not having enough time to get anything done. I’ve come to realize that our imagination doesn’t necessarily flourish in the luxury of total freedom, where it can become a flabby and aimless wastrel. Our imagination thrives when pressure is applied, when boundaries are set.

In fact, not having enough time to write might ironically just be the best thing for one’s writing. I learned this lesson in my early days of parenthood, when my writing had come to a standstill and I just couldn’t elbow my way into the time I needed to write my novel. I decided to jump-start things by participating in National Novel Writing Month for the first time—a challenge to write 50,000 words in the month of November—and I learned that the pressure of writing 1,667 words per day forced me to draw from a well of creativity that would have otherwise gone unexplored. A time restriction took away many of the choices available to me, choices that caused me to dally or maybe not start at all. The constraint of writing so many words in a mere month helped me banish the perfectionism that was like a devil on my shoulder, whispering in my ear that I shouldn’t attempt an ambitious novel in my confined life. I had to dive in and start writing or I’d fall short of my goal.

Playing the harmonica and guitar regularly helps to prime the pump for the sound of words flowing onto paper—so I try to pick up each instrument every week in order to remember how breath and fingers can make a story anyone anywhere can moan to.

—tyeHimBA JeSS I never read when I get stuck; it doesn’t leave enough room to let the devil slip in. Instead, I look to other forms for the methods to resolve art’s various conundrums. Often music helps, but increasingly I’m interested in photography and the work of the German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, particularly.

—eimeAr mCBride The fastest way to inject new energy into my work is eavesdropping on others. I go to a café, settle down with some tea, and listen to the conversations around me.

—CeleSte nG

For a slow and ponderous writer like myself, it was difficult to write so much each day, so I practiced another constraint: the Pomodoro Technique, a method that breaks down work into intervals separated by short breaks. I set a timer for fifteen minutes and wrote as much as I could. Those bursts of focused writing led me to take creative risks in ways that I wouldn’t have if I’d practiced the more methodical pace of writing I was accustomed to.

Such time constraints have worked for many writers. Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 (Ballantine Books, 1953) during his lunch breaks. Toni Morrison wrote her first novel, The Bluest Eye (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), in the nuggets of time she had after putting her children to bed as a single mom. You might say that small pockets of time are their own special kind of muse. The ticks of the clock are like a metronome for creativity, each tick urging us to get to work now. As Kierkegaard wrote, “The more a person limits himself, the more resourceful he becomes.” In fact, there’s research on creativity that demonstrates that when options are limited, people generate more varied solutions because their attention is less likely to wander.

But the creative benefits of constraints go beyond just the time to write. The constraints of different forms of writing spark different types of creativity as well. Think of different poetic forms, whether it’s a sonnet, a villanelle, or a haiku. These “boxes” make the creative act more difficult, yet the requirements of the form force the writer to look beyond obvious associations and consider different words that fit into the rhyming or iambic scheme. Imaginative leaps don’t necessarily happen by thinking “outside the box,” as the popular saying goes, but within the box.

I learned this when I started writing hundred-word stories after years of writing novels. A novel is like a Southwestern city. You have so much land to build on that you can just keep building farther outward, relishing the sprawl and disregarding any notion of compactness (a potential hazard of urban planning and novel writing). Writing a story in exactly one hundred words is more like building a tiny town hemmed in by mountains and the sea. You have to be very careful with each element you add. You have to eliminate excess. You have to be more intentional in the ways you construct each building and street.

As I practiced writing these tiny stories, I envisioned each of my miniatures as one of artist Joseph Cornell’s box collages—a poetry of assemblages confined in a frame that created its own singular world—and I discovered how the condensation of a hundred-word story could open up the irreducible mystery of a single intense moment.

In many ways, such short-shorts are the prose version of haiku. Like a haiku, a hundred-word story is an imagist’s medium. As the famous haiku writer Bashō said, “The old verse can be about willows. Haiku requires crows picking snails in a rice paddy.” Every word, every detail matters. A piercing precision is key. Flaubert’s idea of the mot juste becomes a guiding aesthetic principle.

Perhaps most important, though, I learned how to craft a story as much through its silences as its words. I wrote with the gaps within and around a story, and I learned how what is omitted can speak as much as the text itself. My narrative tools weren’t just words, but the caesuras and crevices in a story. I learned how tone, diction, and timbre can guide a story as much as a rising narrative trajectory of actions. I considered how readers read by way of connotation as much as they do through denotation, so I wrote my stories with an emphasis on suggestiveness—at an angle, as a fragment—rather than with the connective tissue of longer pieces. I had to learn how to conjure my characters into three-dimensional figures from a single gesture, a turn of phrase, the sparest of details.

“Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes?” Roland Barthes asked in The Pleasure of the Text (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975). The erotic nature of the gape in a garment is an apt metaphor for a hundred-word story because these tiny stories flow from tantalizing glimpses that lure the reader forward. As much as a writer might want to tell the whole story, to

Imaginative leaps don’t necessarily happen by thinking “outside the box,” as the popular saying goes,

but within the box. To jostle myself out of my own stale rhythms, I like wading in strange, unfamiliar work and voices. For me, this means dipping into wild translations (books from Zephyr Press are favorites), old Buddhist sutras (Wisdom of Buddha: The Samdhinirmocana Sutra, translated from the Tibetan by John Powers, comes to mind), aphoristic texts, critical theory, catalogues for art exhibitions, and so on. The less I hear my inner voice, the better.

—Jenny Xie I often write to the soundtrack of The Hours.

The compression and articulation of those three notes churning, ever churning, helps me to play such variations in my essays, so much so that I feel I write best when I write inside Philip Glass’s notes.

—Jill tAlBot

Continued on page 55 A good soak in a bathtub invigorates the senses, relaxes the muscles, and allows the mind to wander.

—d. A. poWell

achieve a comprehensive narrative, a good hundred-word story draws readers forward best via hints and fleeting appearances. You might say the writer takes on the role of a flirt. The words and images of a short-short are akin to the lingering glance or the brush of a hand from a desired lover. Writing within a fixed space taught me how a poetic coyness on the page can titillate the reader to fill in the gaps, to essentially become a co-creator of the story.

The most haunting stories are those that don’t provide answers but open up questions. I pondered the writer Ku Ling’s words, which functioned as a Zen koan for me: “A good shortshort is short but not small, light but not slight.” By writing in such a compressed space, I learned how to create spirals of suspense to make the story bigger. My stories began to move like a flashlight’s beam, as if the reader were following a series of luminous dots on a path through the night.

Deb Olin Unferth, whose most recent story collection, Wait Till You See Me Dance, was published by Graywolf Press in March 2017, says, “The short makes us consider such questions as: What is the essential element of ‘story’? How much can the author leave out and still create a moving, complete narrative? If I remove all backstory, all exposition, all proper nouns, all dialogue—or if I write a story that consists only of dialogue— in what way is it still a story?”

Unferth’s questions are tested in other forms defined around restrictions that strip down the conventional elements of a story. On the shorter side, there are six-word stories and Twitter stories (“Twiction”). If you want to put restrictions on your word choice, try an abecedarius, an alphabet story in which the first letter of every word follows the order of the alphabet or the first word of each sentence follows the alphabet. You can write a lipogram, a story that omits a particular letter or group of letters (usually a vowel, such as E, the most common letter in the English language). James Thurber wrote The Wonderful O (Simon & Schuster, 1957), a fairy tale in which villains ban the letter O from use by the inhabitants of the island of Ooroo. Peter Carey decided not to use any commas in his book True History of the Kelly Gang (Knopf, 2001). Robert Olen Butler wrote each of the sixty-two short-shorts in Severance (Chronicle Books, 2006) around the remaining moments of conscious awareness within human heads after they have been decapitated.

The petri dish of constraint is one that few writers seek out. Within the walls of our lives, we might feel like a tiger pacing back and forth in a zoo, dreaming of a wilder time without walls around us, but unlike the tiger, we can find benefits that are hidden in our confinement. Barriers can lead to breakthroughs. Without a lack of time, the urgency of our passions might dissipate. Without constraints, we might not feel the piquant pressure that pushes us to find exactly the right word.

I recommend writing in libraries, and I highly recommend changing the table, reading room, and even library you’re working in often. Change of venue is a powerful and perhaps underappreciated creative force.

—JeSSiCA FrAnCiS kAne Don’t spend too much time alone.

—vendelA vidA