IV. Adjacent Territory Essay 28
The Form Makes the Poem
Constraints as a creative engine
A sonnet has fourteen lines. A haiku has seventeen syllables and three lines. A timetable has forty-two periods. A recipe has six ingredients. A staircase has a rise and a run. A sonnet is a box with a lid on, and the lid is exactly the right size, and that is not a restriction on what can be said inside it. It is the reason anything gets said.
We tend to think of constraints as the opposite of freedom, and we are taught that the good conditions for work are the ones with the fewest constraints. A blank page, a deadline you set yourself, no rules. It sounds right and it produces very little.
A constraint is not a limit on the work. A constraint is the thing that decides what the work is. Remove the form and you do not get a freer poem. You get a list of lines.
Take a kitchen. A kitchen is a box with a fixed number of square metres, a water supply, a drain, a power socket, and a door that opens in a direction because of where the stairs are. That is a very tight set of constraints and it is the reason a kitchen is a kitchen and not a field.
Now imagine the same floor area with no constraints at all. No fixed positions, no water, no drainage, no power, no door. What could you make there? You could make anything, in the sense that a mark on a page can be anything, and the result would be nothing in particular, because the constraints were doing the work of choosing. The water supply is what puts the sink next to the wall. The drain is what puts the sink where it is. The door is what puts the counter where it is, because you have to reach the fridge without crossing the working triangle.
And the working triangle is the beautiful part. Every kitchen designer arrives at the same arrangement, not because they copied each other but because they are all solving the same problem with the same constraints. The constraints produced a convergence, which looks like a convention and is actually a deduction. Remove the constraints and the convergence disappears along with everything else.
What a constraint is
A constraint is any feature of the situation that reduces the space of possible things. That is a very broad definition and it is deliberately broad, because the useful thing about constraints is that they are not one kind of thing. A constraint can be physical, like the size of a room or the length of a poem. It can be a rule, like a game or a law or a house style. It can be a fact about the material, like the properties of clay. It can be a budget, or a deadline, or a person who has to be involved.
What all of them have in common is that they make some things possible and most things impossible, and that without them the space of possibilities is so large that nothing gets chosen. The work does not need freedom. The work needs a shape.
And there is a second thing constraints do, which is easier to miss. They do not only exclude. They also generate. A sonnet's line length is a limit, and it is also a rhythm, and the rhythm generates a kind of sentence that would not have been written without it, because the shape pushes the writer towards certain moves and away from others. A haiku's three lines are a limit and also a shape, and the shape is the reason the first two lines do one thing and the third does another. The form is not a container for the poem. The form is a large part of what produces the poem.
Inside and around
There are two ways of responding to a constraint, and they look similar and are opposites.
The first is to work around it. The form is an obstacle, the constraint is a limitation, and the creative act is to find a way past it, usually by ignoring it. Write the poem and then cut it down. Design the kitchen and then add the third burner in a place the plumbers will hate. Make the piece and then check it against a brief it was never really for.
The second is to work inside it. The form is the material. The constraint is the thing you are making with, in the same way that clay is the material and the kiln is the material. This is harder and it is the better work, and the difference shows up in the results rather than in the attitude, because work made around a constraint looks like the constraint was not there, and work made inside one cannot be imagined without it.
What if the constraint became much tighter? A poet is told the whole poem must be one word. Almost nobody can do it and the ones who can produce something that is not a poem with a constraint on it. It is a different object, and the object is stranger and shorter and sometimes better. The tightening of a form is a change of kind, and this is the part that makes constraints generative rather than merely limiting: the constraint is not on the work, the constraint is the work.
Now change the condition. What if the constraint were removed entirely, with a blank page and no brief and no deadline? The result is not free, it is undecided, and undecided looks a great deal like free from the inside. Almost every writer and every designer who has had this experience has discovered that the hardest part of the blank page is not the absence of rules. It is the absence of any problem to push against.
"Constraints are the enemy of good work." Some constraints are, and they are the ones that are arbitrary, externally imposed, and not understood. The cure for those is not freedom, it is a better constraint. A designer who is told the work must be three colours because the client likes blue is imprisoned by a constraint that could be replaced with a better one in a conversation. A designer who is told the work must work at a distance of two metres because the space is small has been given a constraint, and a constraint that has a reason can be worked with.
The other misconception: "more constraints make less interesting work." The interesting constraint is the one that is hard but not arbitrary, tight but not impossible, and shared rather than imposed. It is also the one you can explain to somebody else. The difference between a good constraint and a bad one is almost always whether there is a reason for it, and whether the person living with it knows the reason.
Constraints everywhere, and the ones that are cheap
Once you look for them, constraints are everywhere, and they come in a rough order of how much they teach you.
The cheapest are the formal ones. The form of a poem, the number of lines, the rule of a game, the length of a brief. These are visible, countable, and easy to hold in mind, and they are the ones people reach for. They teach the least, because the work is made around them.
Then there are the material ones. Clay shrinks. A string has a length. A room has a door. Timber has a grain and it will split along the grain whatever you would prefer. These teach a lot, because you cannot work around them and because they will tell you what to do if you listen. Every craft is a set of material constraints that have been listened to for long enough to become rules.
Then there are the human ones. The room is booked. The only person who can do this is on holiday. The customer wants it by Friday and does not know what Friday is. These are the ones that make work interesting, because they are not facts about the world, they are facts about other people, and they can be negotiated, and the negotiation is a different kind of creative act entirely.
The best constraints are the ones that are true, understood, and shared. A rule everybody can state is a rule everybody can work with. A rule that only one person knows is a surprise waiting to happen, and the surprise will land in the worst possible week.
Limits
Not every constraint should be kept. A constraint that has stopped serving the work is a constraint that has become a habit, and there is a moment when the form is more important than the thing inside it. A sonnet that is written because the form is the form, and the fourteen lines are fourteen lines of nothing, is worse than the same fifteen lines with no form at all, and the person who wrote it will usually know.
Second limit: this essay is about constraints as a creative engine, and that framing has a habit of being used to defend any rule anybody has ever set. The question of whether a particular constraint should exist is not a creative question, and the answer to it is not found by discovering what the constraint makes possible. It is found by asking whose purposes the constraint serves, which is a different question, and one that belongs to the level above the ladder.
Third limit: the examples here are all from making and building, where the constraint is a fact about materials. In other kinds of work the constraint is usually a fact about other people, and the dynamics are different, because a person can argue back. The version of this essay that matters for a writer, a teacher, or a manager is not about clay.
Stuck
You are stuck at the principle level with a constraint when you have a rule and no way of working with it. The rule is a wall, and the only options are to break it or to stop. The tell is that you have begun to think of the rule as the problem rather than as the material.
The way out is to find out why the rule exists, and to look for the version of the rule that the reason actually supports. Almost every constraint has a purpose behind it and a form in front of it, and they drift apart over time. The rule says the report must be two pages. The purpose is that it must be read. Those are not the same requirement, and the second one allows a ten page report with a one page summary, which is a different object and a better one.
Sources
- Poetic forms such as the sonnet and the haiku are described here only in terms of their structural constraints. No poem, line, or phrase from any poem is quoted, and no form is set out in full.
- The discussion of constraints as generators of work is the author's own, drawing on ordinary practice in craft and design rather than on any particular text.
- All examples are ordinary and hypothetical.