Afterward as Forward

I love a constraint. My students tend to hate them. They come into my classes believing that rules are for academic writing and that no rules equals freedom. Early on, I let that slide. But I started to worry that their work felt directionless without constraint.

This might be projection. I don’t do well with unstructured time. I like predictability.

You know what’s not predictable? Children.

With a seven-year-old and a three-month-old at home (when I originally wrote this), tiny humans are a significant part of who I am.

I was overwhelmed by the prospect of writing this talk because of those tiny humans. So, I gave myself 15 minutes a day. I stopped (often mid-thought) if I was interrupted by something/someone needing me and left the writing at the point of interruption.

A heads-up: it’s now been truncated from its original form to fit within the confines of this new format.

 

June 1: 3:30 p.m.

Baby down after 45 minutes of back-arching, purple-faced wailing. Seven-year-old building an obstacle course out of yoga mats and stools.

I’ve got maybe twenty minutes.

Where to begin?

Seven-year-old asks me to watch her do a cartwheel.

Not off to a great start.

 

June 2: I Am Not a Jailer

I am not advocating creative jail.

Constraints should arise organically. From necessity. From children. From time.

Jenny Offill says she always wants a “semi-impossible constraint.” Her novel, Dept. of Speculation, was fragmented because fragments were all she could hold while raising a child and teaching.

The constraint wasn’t clever. It was survival.

 

June 3: Lies We Tell Ourselves

I used to say I just needed time. A residency. Silence.

I got it once—three weeks in the Adirondacks.

I spent five days walking around a lake to avoid my manuscript.

It was too quiet. Too free.

 

June 4: Writing While Responsible

You’re in the middle of a sentence—something good—and the baby monitor erupts. You think, just fifteen more seconds. But you don’t wait, of course. You go.

You come back later. The sentence is gone.

It took me a long time to realize that isn’t failure.

 

June 5: Form Follows Function Follows Exhaustion

My first book was fragmented because I was fragmented.

Afterward, I thought that was how I wrote.

For my second book, I gave myself a constraint: 500 words in one hour. That’s what I could manage while parenting and teaching.

One hour. 500 words.

It worked. Mostly.

 

June 6: On Word Count and Survival

Some people worship at the altar of 1,000 words a day or whatever other constraint and never reevaluate.

I worshipped at the altar of 500 words in one hour.

It got me through a draft.

 

June 7: My So-Called Life

Here’s my rule now: something is better than nothing.

One paragraph. One line. One note in my Notes app.

Sometimes writing looks like holding a baby while typing something half-coherent on your phone.

 

June 8: Constraint Is Not the Enemy

Constraint is rhythm.

Infinite choice is paralyzing.

Constraints aren’t forever. They run their course.

My 500 words in one hour only got me so far.

 

June 9: What I’m Trying to Say

I used to think writing made me a Writer.

Now I think it’s the returning.

Drafting between diaper changes. Writing on the fridge while microwaving dinosaur chicken nuggets.

The evolving constraint isn’t carving out time. It’s bending to the shape time has taken.

 

June 10: Sign the Dotted Line

Every piece of writing is a contract.

First person promises intimacy. Chronology promises cause and effect.

Good writing pushes against the contract but honors it.

Go all in on the constraint.

But be willing to leave it when it stops serving you.

 

June 11: 500 Words Crash and Burn

A year in, my 500-word rule sputtered. People call that a block.

I don’t believe in blocks. Fog is better.

I hadn’t exhausted the project. I’d exhausted the constraint.

I was in an MFA program. I had to finish. So I knit the fragments into a more linear narrative. Shifted one constraint into another—made it a kind of game.

 

June 11 Redux: A Cheat Moment

That shift opened space in the writing.

Someone asked me, “Is this still serving you?”

That question changed everything.

 

June 12: Constraints I’ve Given Myself

• This essay in discrete units.
• No dialogue.
• Only dialogue.
• Third-person limited.
• One hour every day.
• 500 words per day.
• No character names.
• 5 a.m. to 6 a.m.

 

June 13: The List Continues

• Character names as concrete nouns.
• No military jargon.
• Second person only.
• Chronological.
• Segmented achronological.

Note: The ones that work best arise from necessity.

 

June 14: On Deadlines

I do my best work with deadlines.

A timeframe, a subject, a limit—that equals production.

A due date is a gift.

 

June 15: The Baby Wakes Up Again

It’s dark.

Bouncing on yoga ball.

Had a thought. Forgot it.

Memory. Impermanence.

 

June 16: Constraint as Rebellion

When you’ve been in the military, people expect a certain story: Trauma. Heroism. Failure. Redemption.

Those constraints are boring.

To mean anything, you have to disrupt expectation.

Draw people in with form. With restraint. With voice.

Constraints can subvert.

This is what I mean by necessity.

 

June 17: The Tyranny of Time

“I don’t have time” isn’t a lie.

We all have 24 hours, but we do not have the same 24 hours.

Caregiving, work, health—labor looks different for different people.

Sometimes time wins.

Life breaks the constraint.

 

June 18: Von Trier’s Dogme 95

Dogme 95 imposed strict filmmaking rules: no artificial lighting, no props not on location.

Pretentious. Also kind of brilliant.

Limits simplify decisions. If you can’t cut to a close-up, the wide shot has to matter.

Constraint is control.

 

June 19: Update

The movement faded. Maybe the constraints ran their course.

Maybe they were too strict.

Even so, aspects lingered.

 

June 20: From the Mouths of Babes

My daughter used to draw whole stories.

Each picture a narrative unit. Emotional logic over linear logic.

She didn’t start with freedom.

She started with a problem.

 

June 21: Camus’s Day Job

Student I had once really liked Camus. I didn’t know anything about him (Camus). Looked him up the other day because I randomly thought of the student.

Camus worked a lot of day jobs. Wrote on the tram.

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion,” he wrote.

Camus and I might not have seen eye to eye re: constraint.

 

June 22: Bruce

The mechanical shark, named Bruce, in Jaws kept breaking on set.

Spielberg’s solution was to keep the thing off-screen. Used sound and absence.

Necessary constraint created dread. (Not to mention filmic revolution.)

 

June 23: Matt the Relentless (Yes, this is a reference to the TV show What We Do in the Shadows)

Constraint makes my work more honest.

Word count. Deadline. Form.

Fewer options means less avoidance means more focus, more return.

 

June 24: George Saunders’s Problems

Every story begins with a problem.

Lots of writers probably said that, but Saunders gets the credit because he’s famous.

Anyway, a problem is a constraint.

What are the possibilities within it?

Every constraint contains an infinite universe.

That’s freedom.

 

June 26: When the Constraint Becomes the Cage

First, don’t worry about June 25. We’re going to act like it didn’t exist.

Now, sometimes the form becomes a hiding place.

Sometimes you miss a deadline.

Sometimes you need to ask for an extension.

You don’t know the constraint has ceased to serve you until you’re wandering in the fog.

 

June 27: This for That

I originally wrote my novel, End of Active Service, in third person.

The characters felt distant.

I switched to first person—something I’d resisted.

The whole book came into focus.

It took years of rewriting.

Constraints aren’t easy fixes.

 

June 28: The Saddest Man in Music

Stephin Merritt sets strict songwriting constraints.

Once he understands the concept, the songs “just [fly] out.”

Limits create momentum.

 

June 29: Good Intentions

Sick. Fuck this.

 

June 30: The Shape of the Thing

Creative freedom feels invigorating.

But that energy is kindling. It doesn’t sustain the fire.

Real freedom happens when you accept the conditions under which the work must happen.

 

July 1: The Shape of the Thing Again

Kent Meyers, my thesis mentor, once advised a struggling writer (not me) to pick a project and draft it all the way through without stopping to fix it.

Let the constraint of finishing override perfection.

 

July 2: The Mars Volta

I’ve been listening to the Mars Volta and thinking about how I grew up listening to concept albums.

Concept albums commit to a world.

 

July 3: The Mars Volta (continued)

That commitment—to tone, arc, constraint—is the point.

External constraints—editors, producers, feedback—are constraints too. The lead singer of the Mars Volta said that.

 

July 4: The Mars Volta (continued)

You work inside them (constraints), resist them, or both.

Constraint isn’t always artistic. Sometimes it’s logistical. Sometimes it’s capitalism. Sometimes it’s grief.

 

July 5: Constraint and Care

Constraint can be care.

A tight form can protect the reader, even the writer.

Routines are care.

I’m not writing in spite of my life.

I’m writing because of it.

 

July 6: Someone Get the Hook

I used to think writing meant protecting time.

Now I think it means writing anyway. That returning.

I don’t want the kind of freedom that exists only in silence anymore.

 

July 7: The One Necessity

Annie Dillard in “Living Like Weasels,” writes that a weasel lives “yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.”

The weasel isn’t free because it has options.

It’s free because it has one necessity.

Constraint chooses you.

 

July 8: Reiteration

A good constraint isn’t a cage.

It’s a compass.

It gives shape to the noise.

It makes return possible.

 

July 9: The End

This is messy. Repetitive.

But the constraint of the form got me to the page.

Constraint isn’t the enemy.

It’s the thing that gets you back to the work.

Maybe you don’t need a retreat.

Maybe you just need fifteen minutes.

And a rule.

And the willingness to return.

 

 

Matt Young is the author of the memoir Eat the Apple and the novel End of Active Service. He teaches at Centralia College and in the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. You can find more info about him at www.mattyoungauthor.com.