Limitation Is Vital
“Limitation is vital. The first step toward a well-told story is to create a small, knowable world. Artists by nature crave freedom, so the principle that the structure/setting relationship restricts creative choices may stir the rebel in you. With a closer look, however, you’ll see that this relationship couldn’t be more positive. The constraint that setting imposes on story design doesn’t inhibit creativity; it inspires it.
The irony of setting versus story is this: The larger the world, the more diluted the knowledge of the writer, therefore the fewer creative choices and more clichéd the story. The smaller the world, the more complete the knowledge of the writer, therefore the greater his creative choices. Result: a fully original story and victory in the war on cliché.”
-Hollywood screenwriter mentor Robert McKee
When forced to work within a strict framework the imagination is taxed to its upmost – and will produce its richest ideas. Given total freedom the work is likely to sprawl.
“One of the most intriguing phenomena we have noticed is the tendency for high counts of objects on refrigerator panels to co-occur with large numbers of objects per square feet in the house as a whole. Put in another way, a family’s tolerance for a messy refrigerator may be associated with a fairly relaxed attitude about high density or clutter in public rooms in the house.
“As artists and professionals it is our obligation to enact our own internal revolution, a private insurrection inside our own skulls. In the uprising we free ourselves from the tyranny of consumer culture. We overthrow the programming of advertising, movies, video games, magazines, TV and MTV by which we have been hypnotized from the cradle. We unplug ourselves from the grid by recognizing that we will never cure our restlessness by contributing our disposable income to the bottom line of Bullshit, Inc., but only by doing our work.”
Theodor Geisel’s (Dr. Seuss) editor, Bennett Cerf, challenged him to write a book using 50 words or less. He made this challenge when Seuss was writing The Cat in the Hat (which used 225 words) but Geisel didn’t back down from the challenge and wrote Green Eggs and Ham with exactly 50 different words. Those words are: