Bounded, Not Blocked

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I had three years to write fiction, but chose instead to never write a word. Back when I was getting my undergraduate degree, I elected to get a biomedical degree, expecting that to be a better path forward for me than anything I could achieve as a writer. Thanks to getting good grades in high school, I managed to land a place in my college’s Honors College.

Part of the college’s requirements was that students complete an original work before the end of their senior year. The requirement was akin to the thesis a Master’s program requires, though less strict since the original work didn’t have to relate to the student’s major.

I first heard about this during my summer orientation, and decided then and there my thesis would be a fiction book.

Come senior year, I put together my committee and wrote my first book since high school in less than a year. During graduation, the Dean of the Honors College noted I was the only one who elected to do something outside their major in that graduating class.

Since then, I reflect on this series of choices I made and realize I could have started much sooner. My coursework didn’t ask for more of my time as I advanced in my degree, and yet I still chose to avoid writing. For some reason, I didn’t let myself have the permission to write the way that I had afforded myself when I was younger.

For some reason, I was okay with waiting three years to do something productive and worthwhile that I wanted to do every day. I never fully understood that contradiction until recently.

The problem I created for myself without realizing back then was that I bounded the timeframe in which I was allowed to write based on the permission the Honors College gave me to pursue the degree I thought I needed and the passion I knew I had. I couldn’t write fiction for my biomedical degree, but I could for the thesis, and that made me believe I had to wait to engage in my passion.

To extrapolate, I created a constraint that I then felt beholden to, but that constraint only existed because I put it there, not because of the conditions of my reality.

I see constraints as the selection mechanisms we choose to follow. For writers, our constraints can be the medium in which we record our work, the deadline we set for our work, the format we choose for our piece(s) to follow, and so on. Whenever we, the individual writers, get to make a choice about our work’s shape and intent, that is a constraint.

In last week’s newsletter about the two rates of drafting writing, I talked about the endless possibility space the blank page represents. In that piece, I describe how every mark you make condenses that possibility space, as even a single letter or punctuation mark reduces the sensible options of what comes next. The choices you make during the action of drafting condense the page’s potential forms down to a narrower range of options with each letter you write.

But that reduction in possibility space is a good thing. An availability of unlimited choices means far more considerations have to go into every choice, and it leads to a spiral of paralyzing uncertainty. This arrestment is why so many writers look to plan out their works before starting: it gives the mind something to focus on.

Yet, when making these choices, we aren’t looking at reducing the scope or aim of the piece we want to make. Instead, each choice is helping us refine the possibility space of the work into something tenable, not kill our ambitions. We want to explore a bounded field to its greatest measure, not squeeze ourselves into a tiny space for the sake of safety.

A savvy reader at this point will sense the coming shift towards productivity habits and calls to deep work from here. These tips proliferate the writing world today, and I don’t deny their utility. I have written several previous pieces on how I adapted those useful kernels into my personal workflows:

Each of those are full-sized newsletter breakdowns I wrote before this piece because I wanted to get people the tools and approaches that made writing easier for me, and hopefully, for others.

As I’ve already spoken on matters of productivity, I don’t want to rehash it here. Instead, my goal here is to explain how the tactical use of constraints makes it easier to transition from the brainstorming and researching phase of writing to the drafting phase.

You can’t continue something you never started in the first place.

The goal of good constraints is to provide the bounds that afford the possibility space of your work enough focus to know what to create and when, but not so restrictive that it chokes out the possibility for something emergent and creative to occur.

In other words, good constraints supercharge your creativity by reducing the mental load of choosing scope, freeing up brain power to create inside the piece you want to make.

I’ve described the design of good constraints as akin to building a pasture for animals, not a factory farm or a free-range ranch. The animals in this metaphor are your ideas and your work, and the space represents your ability to explore and choose during the process of drafting.

In factory farms, we see the animals pressed close together with minimal room. They have no agency as they have no room to move; they eat whatever is given to them from their overlords, and they receive no mental stimulation because all things are pre-selected for them.

At the opposite end, a free-range ranch means that the animals have total control of their lives. Those animals can wander wherever they like, eat what they please, and live the life they want, unbounded, including the ability to wander off into a predator’s waiting jaws.

With open, fenced pastures, we achieve a mix of both. The design of the constraints should give freedom for exploration, consideration, and emergent creativity, but limit the width of what we can explore so that creative efforts stay focused on the point of the piece.

We don’t want our ideas suppressed by our own tyrannical plans, nor do we want to consider all things as possible for a draft. Instead, we constrain ourselves to something we write about, and explore the process to get there through the focused choices we make as we draft.

I’ve been the person with both too many and too few constraints, both of which led me to be paralyzed in my writing. Those case studies are the framing I want to use to explain my point, and also show where this idea of “the pasture” I mentioned earlier comes from.

Looking back to the constraints I gained once writing became a required part of my graduation criteria in college, the boundaries around my writing looked much different. Mostly because they now existed.

I had under a year to create and publish my draft. I had a committee of two professors, and another trusted creative from the community that oversaw updates on my draft on an every-other-week basis. I had to present not just the book in its finished form, but also the preparatory materials that proved the creative process, the literary analysis behind my novel’s themes, and the next steps to take the book to true publication.

I call these constraints because, although they were necessary to graduate from the Honors College, they weren’t required to graduate and move on to pharmacy school. My graduation from college was all but assured by this point, and my test scores for pharmacy school were in a range where even a mediocre GPA for pharmacy school applicants wouldn’t have been an impairment.

I could have ignored all these boundaries, but chose to accept them because I wanted to write. The fact that this book counted for my college education and greater accolades was just gravy.

That means that these conditions were not required. Rather, they created a fence around what I had to get done, and I then chose the means and methods by which I would create. Taking the constraints of my thesis requirement and leveraging them to motivate my writing gave me an output I hadn’t seen in years.

Likewise, I have been the man with seemingly no time to write. I’ve written before about the reality of when I sought to transition careers from a chemical plant QC technician to a freelance writer,

But the highlights include: waking up at 4 AM each morning, working 45 hours each week, then coming home and writing for several hours to meet the expectations of low-paying, starter freelance contracts. Overall, it was common for me to work 70 to 80 hours across the full week.

Mercifully, those conditions only lasted about nine months. During that time, there was no obvious way to inject fiction work into my life. Yet, I had a group of friends who gathered every week for tabletop games based on the setting I had made years prior. It was unrelated to the book I wrote in college, but something that mattered to all my loved ones and me.

I barely had time to set up the systems underpinning those weekly game nights. Maps, tokens, and adventure options were all I had time for. Everything I ran during those nine months worked based on the years of preparation I had done before this career transition. It had to, or else I would disappoint the people that came each week.

So, I don’t refute that conditions that make writing difficult exist. I refute that they’re exclusionary.

I agree that there are literal conditions that keep someone from writing, such as a physical lack of access to the means or tools to do so. But it’s an incredibly rare condition that exists today, and almost unworthy of discussing as a result, so I’ll concede its existence and move on.

Doing that maintenance work for nine months still created small bits of novel work that, at the time, didn’t register as important. However, the ramifications of making those choices and flexing that creativity have lasting impacts on the fiction work I do today, six years later. Despite the 70 hours of work each week, I still pushed my writing forward towards the form it has today.

For instance, I knew early on that several key characters wouldn’t survive the climactic fight of the story. Yet, it wasn’t until I chose the map representing one of these characters’ homes that I realized they could do something dramatic: end themselves and the means by which they were tethered to something they hated in front of the players.

That didn’t register during maintenance of the game. It emerged as a result of looking back at choices I made during that period and leveraging them into something meaningful and emotional.

No amount of mindset shift or productivity boosts could change the conditions I was in. No magical morning routine could get those hours spent at work back. And yet I still pushed forward with what I had.

There’s advice I hear in the writing sphere, and creative ventures overall, that is akin to “a real creative would find a way.” It’s an unfalsifiable piece of advice given by those talented or lucky enough to make it because it’s true for them. Those creatives didn’t give up, pushed through the conditions that could have held them back, and they achieved what they set out for, or perhaps even more than that.

Meanwhile, all those who were held back by their conditions aren’t on the stage. No microphone is given to them for others to hear their stories or learn their lessons. Therefore, we don’t get to hear those experiences and learn to what extent those conditions could affect us.

The trap that’s easy to fall into is the one where we mistake our evasions as constraints. In other words, we take the emotions we feel about our conditions and assume them to be rules against us, rather than hurdles to transcend.

Look back to the two case studies. In college, I applied rules to myself that kept me from writing for three years. As an adult looking to make a career change, I had a guaranteed 70 hours each week I had to commit to keep a roof over my head and achieve a better vocational life for myself.

In the first case, all constraints were assumed by emotional avoidance and a belief that writing wasn’t the way for me. In the latter, I created works, albeit incredibly small, all while walking towards something that better encapsulated what I wanted my writing to be for my career.

That was the lesson to learn from comparing these two case studies: we don’t overcome our conditions; we transcend our evasions. We overcome the fears and negativity the conditions make us feel, giving us the means to slowly change the conditions, if possible to do so.

Regardless of where you are, there are conditions and constraints that are true and not always elective. Those conditions have to be labeled as such, and accommodated to ensure you can achieve what you want with your writing.

A writer recognizes and accepts their conditions, yet creates anyway.

So, to see what constraints are truly evasions you’re feeding, answer these questions about what gets in the way of your writing:

I’m not interested in judging your life and its conditions. But if I can offer the means by which to weed out evasions and craft focus towards writing in spite of unideal circumstances, that would be my goal.

All these case studies and arguments about constraints and evasions lead to the main point I am trying to make: the process by which you enter drafting as a writer comes down to your understanding of the scaffolding you’ve set up for yourself to write by.

Before you write, the brainstorming and research that goes into a piece gives you the outline by which you can ensure your work makes its arguments or provides what you found. That outline represents the content you want to cover, but it isn’t a roadmap that gets you from pure information to a drafted piece.

For example, I wrote hundreds, if not thousands, of articles as a freelance writer. Each time I received a brief for a new article, my process after researching the topic involved setting all of my headers, subheadings, images, and word count budgets for each section. I would make a determination on how long I needed for each section to make the point that section needed, referencing my outline as a content measure, not a place to build from.

My headings and their word count budgets were the tools I used for that. The distinction here is that setting those headings and word counts wasn’t preparation for me to draft, but instead the manufacturing of constraints so the pasture was the right size for me to write in. Otherwise, my mind would wander to other possibilities mid-draft, and my output suffered as a result.

I’ve collected that process and the method behind it into The Writer’s Scaffold:

It has room for twelve sections for your writing, whether this be chapters, headers, or some other delineation you can make. You’ll make the constraints you have for your writing clear, like deadlines and total word count, before defining each section by its purpose, word count, and additional resources you need to complete that section, like pictures or links.

Codifying these factors for each section gives you the entire scaffold you’d need to start drafting your next piece with a clear, stepwise process, meaning it represents the last thing you need before beginning drafting your piece.

A while ago, I borrowed an analogy from the specific translator I used to explain why great writing has soul from the Aristotelian definition, where the author likens the body and soul of living beings to a string quartet by Mozart. The piece exists as a record on paper, but becomes an experience when played by its four musicians. It takes the body of the sheet music and the soul added by the musician’s performances to create the full experience of the piece.

The progression to this state is the goal of drafting. Drafting in and of itself does not create the whole of the written work, as we’ve seen from the work it takes to get ready to draft, and the editing work that will come once the draft is done.

Many people just see drafting as writing, maybe publication if they value a piece’s reach. Few consider the time put into the construction phase, or the refinement that happens before publication.

Soon, we’ll be covering what that feedback collection for refinement looks like. For now, just know that the tools we’ve made for the last few weeks to better prepare and execute your draft are leading towards that next step.

Sit down with The Writer’s Scaffold with a piece you’re already committed to creating and write out each section as laid out in the worksheet. Be as clear as possible, so there’s no room for guesswork while you draft that piece.

If I had to guess, I imagine someone new to this process will struggle with picking word counts, as it isn’t always clear how long you’ll need to make the point a section needs to achieve that clarity for the reader.

I’d also assume this will feel silly the first few times. It doesn’t feel natural to set scaffolding like this when so many are taught in school to start at the beginning and go straight through once. But learning this process creates the pasture that makes focused creativity possible.

I spent years in a free-range state achieving nothing. Setting boundaries for my work like this is the process I used to get hundreds of articles out the door, or to write a book in less than a year as a student. Losing those years is the cost of refusing to set those bounds.

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