Creative Freedom is Overrated

When I was a kid, my aunt once told me that the worst thing you could ask of an artist was to “draw something” or “paint something” or “sculpt something.” She told me that having the ability to create just about anything often resulted in her creating nothing at all.

This concept was really solidified for me when I listened to an episode of Under The Influence with Terry O’Reilly. He made a compelling case for the limitation of freedom as a powerful source of creative inspiration. He uses Mick Jagger as an example, who had to perform in very narrow, crowded stages in his early career. This constrictive environment resulted in Jagger’s iconic way of moving during his performance, which is characterized by lots of small, sharp, tight motions.

For a more contemporary example, I would point to the video platform Vine (God rest its soul). Each video having a maximum of six seconds seems like an absurd limitation to place on the platform’s creators, and yet it resulted in some of the most iconic pieces of bite-sized comedy in the past decade.

That’s not to say that nothing good ever came from works with lots of freedom of expression, although I believe that these are generally the exception rather than the rule. There’s just something about being backed into a corner that really stimulates the creative process.

I think this was one of the major flaws of The Archman. Reading back over it, I took far too many liberties when it came to things like plot, pacing, and general narrative structure. The amount of action that takes place in the first 20 chapters could have realistically been condensed into just 12. I recognized this during the editing process, but kept most of the material in spite of that awareness because I couldn’t bring myself to scrap the parts of the novel which contributed nothing of value to the overarching narrative. As a result, the final product ended up being over 125 000 words, which I think is far too much for a novel that is essentially vampire pirate smut.

I hope to remedy this error as I’m writing Ezaroth’s Incantation, by giving myself a set limit of 50 chapters and a total word count maximum of 55 000. I hope that this will force me to be more succinct and concise with my language, the end result being a novel with a much tighter pace and with much less fluff (though I fully intend to keep the gratuitous smut scenes).