Constraint Is What a Creative Needs

For my entire creative life, I’ve been preoccupied with the tension between freedom and constraint. As a girl who grew up in evangelical purity culture, I was given a very clear template about what I was supposed to aspire to: traditional marriage and motherhood. And with this script, I was also aware of my role. I was supposed to play the part of helper. In trying to do this, I learned how to become a people pleaser.

(The Nature and Value of Loneliness for Writers.)

This playbook for my life felt both restrictive and safe. To achieve the ideals of traditional womanhood in evangelical purity culture, I twisted my unruly self into submission, making my body and voice, dreams and ambitions, smaller. This practice may not have fed my creative life, but it did teach me something about working within constraint.

And constraint, as long as there’s still room to breathe, can be exactly what a creative needs.

Take, for example, constraint’s seeming opposite: boundless freedom. I know a bit about that, too. No one’s life can be reduced down to a single narrative, after all. As an amateur writer, it was startling to discover that one of the worst things for my practice and productivity was total freedom. I think of my first summer out of graduate school, a teaching position secure for the fall, and living comfortably (though not well) off of my savings and my husband’s salary. We were renters with no children or pets. Our parents were healthy, occupied, and elsewhere. And my summer days were long stretches filled with few commitments: just me, my notebook, and a pen.

What could I create in those months filled with so much uninterrupted writing time?

As it turns out, not much. Each day, I labored over paragraphs, only to delete them. I tinkered over the structure of individual sentences. What was I writing about? I was bound to discover it in-process. This endeavor felt pure, like I was a true artist. I paused during my mornings to read novels for inspiration. I took long, mid-day runs in hopes that the muse would meet me on the trail. I recovered from those runs on the couch, television on. The day would end, and it would be time to make dinner for my husband who had been hard at work all day. I swallowed shame when I considered how little I had to show after my own day of supposed writing work.

When I began teaching in the fall, I didn’t even have a complete, revised creative piece to show for it. It seemed clear to me then: I was not a writer. I refused to fool myself. If this was how unproductive I was after such an indulgent few months (and truly—I was ashamed at the extent of my own leisure), writing was clearly not the life path for me.

And so, this not-writer threw herself full force into teaching writing. I developed creative prompts and assignments. I scaffolded activities. I mentored students individually. I was quite productive, busy all the time, and even though I would not yet be able to apply it to my own practice, I learned that students produced their strongest work while working within constraints.

Yes—seasoned teachers know this. I never told a student to just write a research paper. I gave them a thematic umbrella. A sample organizational structure. I showed them models, and then I had them really rip those models to pieces. We looked at every stage of a piece of writing. The title—how long is it? The intro—does the writer address the reader? Does the first line make someone laugh or wonder? Is the argument made right up front, or does it take a few paragraphs before it is introduced? And so on—I taught students to deconstruct. Together, we looked at transitions and observed how the writer was moving from one idea to another. And how they kept the reader’s attention and focus along the way.

And then I told my students—okay, class. For homework, go do those things! Follow the constraints you just observed. But, you know, follow them your way. Creatively.

To give my students complete and total freedom would not just have been overwhelming—it would have resulted in poor work. True creativity did not come from totally eschewing constraints, I realized. It came from deconstructing the ones that were present—and then inviting surprise and play within those lines.

Around this same time, I encountered additional constraint in my personal life, too. It wasn’t until my schedule became less free that I found room to move on the page. I gave birth to a baby, and I began incorporating short, 10-minute daily journaling into my morning routine—just to keep my own sanity. And then, I gave birth to another baby. With this additional responsibility, I felt compelled to compose full essays. Then the pandemic happened. Trapped in my home with two toddlers and unstable childcare, my increased constraints resulted in finding the space to write an entire book.

It may seem counterintuitive, but my voice didn’t emerge in the midst of total freedom. I found it as my life became more squeezed, more full of responsibility. Time is slippery, and the creative life is not subject to basic math. Anyone who has ever worked a fixed 9-5 job knows that more time does not equal more productivity.

Of course, there has to be some time. No one can create without a bit of margin. Still, writers need something to rub up against. Friction, tension. Maybe that’s a baby or five. Maybe that’s a bustling medical practice.

Maybe that’s marriage and motherhood.

Most of my writerly obsessions are about the push and pull between freedom and constraint. The constraints of traditional marriage and motherhood could work for me—if I wanted them to—as long as I had room to play. In knowing my expected script—one of helpful submission—I could learn to subvert it, both in my personal life and on the page.

Maybe marriage and motherhood wasn’t a constraint I wanted to impose upon my life. That would be okay—but, I realized as I grew older, that there was no place I could flee to where I would not have to follow some sort of script. In deconstructing my upbringing, I began to see that every societal role included some kind of script. As a teacher, for instance, I followed a script. I worked within the scope of my institution. That involved expectations and rules, hierarchy and submission. It wasn’t like girls in evangelical purity culture were the only ones expected to follow a playbook.

Wouldn’t it be lovely, though, to find a space where I would not be boxed in? At times, I fantasized about total deconstruction. What if I tore it all down? I wanted wide open spaces, fresh air, and room to breathe.

But no enclosure wouldn’t mean absolute freedom. It would simply mean being unhoused. We all know that a home is preferable to none at all—the question was simply, what kind of home did I want to live in?

This is what I learned about myself and creative constraints. It’s not my box that limits me, but the quality of the space inside it. When a place feels imbued with grace and forgiveness, rather than discipline and punishment, art can emerge. This is true no matter the limits a person finds themself up again. Limits, after all, aren’t fundamentally restrictive. Sometimes they can be the very place we go to find tension.

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