Mind Performance Hacks

Hack #24. Constrain Yourself

Rigidly constrain your creative work to find the potentially fascinating emergent effects that happen when you have to overcome artificial obstacles.

Because the word constraint has such negative connotations in our culture, and because this book is about freeing your mind, you might be wondering if I'm about to attempt an Orwellian war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength reversal. Examples of paradoxically productive, even freeing constraint familiar to people in our culture aren't hard to come by, however: for example, it is actually easier to write good poetry with rhyme and meter than good free verse, because rhyme and meter force your pen to interesting places it would never normally visit—a potent mind performance hack bequeathed to us by the ancients!

Some French artists known collectively as the Oulipo ( Ouvroir de Littèrature Potentielle, or Workshop for Potential Literature) have brought the theory and practice of creative constraints to a refinement never before experienced. Unconstrained writing, such as free verse or ordinary prose, is of no interest to the Oulipo. Rules and games as applied to literature are the sole reason for being of the group, which was founded in 1960. Even rhyme and meter are considered insignificant as constraints by these pioneers, who prefer to write enormous palindromes, novels without the letter E, and farces whose structure is determined by the mathematical principles of combinatorics.

There ...