Constrain yourself
Michael Easter had a great post today mentioning the new “art” form of Pecha Kucha. I happened to read the same Wired article today and was similarly fascinated. Pecha Kucha is done with PowerPoint and allows 20 slides, each displayed for 20 seconds yielding a 6:40 piece. See more a little more at Wikipedia.
I think constraints are absolutely freeing in a wonderful paradox. There’s so many classical music forms that composers wrote in, or the various forms of poetry, obfuscated programming contests, or even the 37 Signals “Getting Real” ethos which preaches timeboxed iterations.
Choosing the overall structure seems to box you in but actually removes choices giving you more freedom to focus on the content and to have that focus driven by the structure itself.
Whenever I think about this subject, I always go back to a creative writing class I took in high school where we had to write a sestina, which is a particular poetic form where you have 6 line stanzas, each of which ends in one of the same six words you choose in a particular order. I won’t torture you with the outcome, but I thought at the time that it was certainly something I would never have come up with without the structure imposed by the form.
Hi! My name is Alex Miller and I live in St. Louis. I write code for a living and currently work for 
I think Igor Stravinsky said it best (and succinctly)…
“My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit.”
Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music
(from his Harvard lectures in the 40s)
re: Dean. That’s an awesome quote….
re: sestina. A friend was an English honours student… She had to write many different forms and the sestina was her absolute nemesis. It’s crazy…
One thing about structures, IMHO, is that it allows people to be funny/witty against the structure itself. I remember reading about a concerto by Mozart where, at one point, 100 years of tradition and the culture of the times dictated that the next “theme” in the piece should be in a major key. Wolfgang builds up to it dramatically, and then opens the theme in a _minor_ key before modulating to major. This was edgy (and funny) stuff in 1780.
That Mozart – always a kidder.
I haven’t been able to search back to this quote, but I recall it was Picasso who said something about a nothing as terrifying as a blank canvas. The decision to restrict yourself to pencil or acrylic frees you from some amount of that fear. I always think about this in coding standards vs creativity arguments. An artist can be as creative as you like with a single color of charcoal; you won’t die from aligning your curly braces. ;-)