Why Constraints Make You More Creative, Not Less

Ask someone what they would make with unlimited time, unlimited money and no brief. Most people stall. The blank page is the hardest brief there is, and it is the one everybody says they want.

Now look at what actually gets made. In 1960 Bennett Cerf bet Theodor Geisel fifty dollars that he could not write a children’s book using fifty distinct words. Geisel wrote Green Eggs and Ham, which went on to sell around eight million copies. The constraint was arbitrary and slightly silly. It also produced the book.

Creative work is a search problem

Coming up with something good means searching a space of possible versions until you find one that works. That framing explains the blank page immediately. If the space is infinite, there is no sensible place to start looking, no way to tell whether you are getting warmer, and no point at which you can say you are finished.

A constraint puts edges on the space. Fifty words. Three chords. One room. A budget of four hundred pounds. Suddenly the search is small enough to actually run, and you can hold the whole thing in your head at once.

Three things a constraint does

It cuts the options down to a size you can work with. Not by removing good answers, but by removing most of the answers, which is what you needed. You were never going to evaluate a million versions anyway.

It gives you a test. With no constraint, “is this good?” is a matter of mood, and your mood at 11pm is not a reliable instrument. With a constraint, you get a question you can answer: does this fit in fifty words or not? That is checkable, and checkable questions are what let you make progress on a bad day.

It forces combinations you would not have reached. The obvious solution is usually the first one you think of, and it is usually blocked by the constraint. So you go looking somewhere else. Studio-era songwriters wrote to a three minute limit because that was what a 45 could hold, and the limit is a large part of why pop song structure looks the way it does.

When you have no constraints, invent some

Most of the time nobody hands you a fifty word bet. You have a vague ambition and an empty afternoon, which is the worst possible starting position. So set your own edges before you begin:

• Give it a deadline short enough to be uncomfortable. Not “this month”. This Thursday.
• Pick one thing to leave out. No dialogue, no colour, no new tools, no budget.
• Decide the size in advance. One page, sixty seconds, four slides.
• Write the last line first and work backwards to it.

The specific constraint matters far less than having one. You are not trying to find the perfect limitation. You are trying to stop searching an infinite space.

The part where this goes wrong

Constraints work when they narrow the search. They fail when they rule out the thing you were actually trying to do. A budget that forces you to be inventive is useful. A budget that means the film cannot be shot is not a creative opportunity, it is just an absent film.

The test is simple enough. If the constraint makes you think harder, keep it. If it makes the work impossible, it was the wrong edge and you should move it.

Geisel had fifty words and a fifty dollar bet. You have a Thursday. Both of those are better than an open afternoon and good intentions.