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Writing: How Setting Limits Grants Freedom

For most of my life I thought my biggest problem was “discipline,” or how to “make myself” do things I should do. In my mind, the more of them I did, the better. For example, writing for 24 hours a day would have been ideal.

Basic needs like eating and sleeping were only unfortunate obstacles to that ideal. More of something virtuous was always better. If I “should” do something, I should do it all the time, at every moment of every day.

I never formulated these thoughts verbally. If I had, maybe I would have seen them for the nonsense that they were. I just felt and believed them until they took the form of chronic anxiety.

To relieve it, I was constantly planning to write, yet I rarely wrote. My goals were too daunting, my resistance too massive. My guilt about not doing what I planned only led to more avoidance. When finally I did write, I spent a lot of time thinking about doing other things.

But all of that changed when I discovered a use for a tool that is often called discipline but that is actually the opposite of forcing an activity: restraint.

My lesson in restraint began with advice that, if you had trouble making yourself write, you could tell yourself, \”Just write a sentence.\” After beginning, you would almost certainly want to write more. I tried it and it worked. But sometimes when I told myself, \”Just write a sentence,\” I became anxious. I was becoming suspicious of myself, because I knew I was trying to trick myself into writing more. For that reason, on some days I really would limit writing to a sentence to \”prove\” to myself it was okay.

Taking the one-sentence rule further by forbidding myself to write more than a sentence yielded some interesting insights.

My feelings toward writing changed. I was amazed at how ordering myself to stop at a sentence created the opposite urge. Forbidden to write, I had to write to be happy. No more guilt. The energetic part of me that had rebelled against writing was now on the side of writing.

The next morning, freed from restraint, I would hurry to my computer the way I used to as a kid on Christmas morning. The chocolate that was forbidden yesterday was finally allowed. Who needed discipline? My concentration sharpened. I lost all sense of time passing.

Although restraint was not the goal, it illuminated my desire to write whereas \”discipline\” had buried it. Discipline led me to ask, “How do I make myself write?” when I needed to ask, “Do I want to write?” Restraint proved to me that I did.

Beyond being a motivational tool, restraint is indispensable to the art of writing. A major problem I struggled with as a writer was knowing what details to omit. If I wrote about an emotional experience, I would try to include every detail and explain everything. But every event I described had a network of tendrils branching off into other memories. Everything I wrote seemed to need an explanation, including the explanations themselves.

In theory I could start writing about my first day of high school and end up writing about the day I was born. I could go back even further to the origin of the universe. I learned to make conscious decisions about what details to omit or de-emphasize. I had to seal off the loose ends and let my story be finite, and that required restraint. I had to say, “For now I am writing about high school. Even though sixth grade bullying affected how I felt about high school, this is not the place to go into all that.”

Paradoxically, boundaries are what allow creative freedom to exist. Some people imagine that art, being emotion-driven, is about chaos. The opposite is true. Without setting limits, there is no art. A painting stops at the edges of a canvas. But within the edges of a limited frame, possibilities are endless.

Setting limits has also benefited a story writing project I began a few months ago. I wanted to write a short story a week, but I had my blog and my novel too. Adding story-writing to them was diffusing my efforts. I felt scattered.

I limited my story-writing to weekends and made the length three pages. The short length of the stories frees me to quickly cycle through many different ideas without any single story blossoming into a massive and daunting project.

It also keeps me from falling prey to “Parkinson’s Law,” which describes an insidious phenomenon of work behavior. The law states: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” In other words, if I give myself ten hours to write a story, I will likely end up taking ten hours, even if I can do it in two.

Limiting the time and length of the stories allows creativity to flourish while preventing the headaches of over-revision. And I look forward to Saturdays now the way I look forward to ice cream. Forbidding myself to write stories during the week makes them more enticing on the weekends.

That is why whenever I hear professional writers advising stoic discipline to aspiring writers, I cringe. Granted, some activities, like paying taxes, are so unpleasant that self-coercion is required to carry them out. But for me, writing is not one of them.

Maybe discipline does work better for some. But for me the freedom of restraint has worked better and I wish I had known about it sooner. I wasted far too many years being disciplined when I could have been writing instead.

Note: Read my earlier post, \”How I Lost My Guilt and Became Addicted to Writing.\” It deals with how the belief that you \”should\” write works against creativity. It was a big hit on Reddit before Reddit kicked me off.

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