Creative Constraints: How Limits Set You Free

This article is for: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced—i.e. ALL of us!

People often think of poetry as free self-expression, where we say what we want, how we want.

And of course that is true: you can write whatever poems you want, and no one can tell you otherwise. (They may or may not like what you write, but you have every right to choose to write it anyway!)

But this is not the whole story.

For you as a creator, trying to come up with the best ideas you can, freedom is not your friend.

The more you write, the more you’ll find that:

The best way to set your creativity free is to give yourself limits and constraints.

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Leaping the fence

To understand how this works, imagine a horse in a huge field of grass.

The horse is well-fed and comfortable. Because the field is all it can see, it doesn’t perceive any reason to gallop off anywhere, so it spends its days ambling around, placidly munching grass. It’s contented, but it never does anything exciting.

However, if someone puts a fence in the field, this horse becomes another animal entirely. Now it feels an insatiable urge to leap over that fence and discover what lies beyond. The higher the fence, the more determined it becomes. It throws off its lethargy, pounds toward the fence as a mass of pure energy, and rises high above it, reveling in its own power and speed.

Your creativity basically is that horse.

Most of the time it’s ambling around, not doing much, because there isn’t a whole lot of need for it. It’s lazy and slow, and when you try to write a poem using it, you don’t get very far!

What you want is the second version of the horse—the one full of energy and determination, that you can ride to the far horizons.

And the way you get that horse is by putting up fences, or constraints: the limits or “rules” that you place on your writing.

It may sound nuts, but the way to get better creative results, is to make things harder for yourself, not easier.

How constraints make things juicier

Suppose I gave you a prompt for a poem. And the prompt was:

Write a poem.

YOU: “That’s it? No other instructions? Nothing to work on? That’s not a prompt!!”

You’re right! It’s not really a prompt, because it hasn’t set you any limits.

While you look at this so-called prompt, your creativity stays stolidly munching in the middle of its fenceless field, and wonders why you’re waving your arms and shouting “Move!”

Now let’s add a constraint to the prompt, and see what happens.

Write a poem about a house.

This still isn’t a great prompt, but it’s better, because it has set you a limit: houses. Your creativity’s field has become a little smaller, and there’s a fence there. Your horse may have started at least trotting. Maybe you’ve even spied a fully-fledged poem idea and are galloping toward it—the house you grew up in, the house you wished you’d bought, the doll’s house you gave to your grandchild, etc.

What if I add some more constraints as well?

Write a poem about a house that remembers what its occupants feel. Tell us what it thinks of its occupiers, using the house’s voice.

This is much better! With luck, the unusual and difficult task of imagining how a house would think and speak is much, much more likely to get your imagination galloping.

And that happens because it is a difficult challenge, not because it’s easy.

This is what I mean when I say, constraints set you free: they get your imagination and creativity going like nothing else.

So if you want to stimulate your creativity, it’s a great idea to set yourself constraints.

Some types of constraints

What kinds of constraints could you use? Tons!

You can be as creative about making constraints for yourself as you are about your poems.

However, here are a few types.

Topic

The most common kind of constraint is what you decide to write about.

This was a big part of the “house” example I gave above:

Write about a house that remembers its owners’ feelings.

Common it may be, but it’s still powerful. You can practice giving yourself extra topic constraints, to get your imagination leaping.

Listing is a great tool here: try out several different ideas and see what’s most promising.

For example, instead of thinking. “I want to write about snow,” you might say:

I want to write about snow as a metaphor for peace
I want to write about polluted snow
I want to write about an older person watching kids play in snow
I want to write about how snowflakes form
I want to write about the ways humanity has used snow…

… and so on.

Form

Form in poetry is all about constraint.

This is especially true of traditional form. All those rules about rhymes, line lengths, which lines or words repeat, and so on, all give you limits to work within. As such, they can help you create new thoughts, if you approach them with an open mind.

In fact some poets, like Philip Larkin or Robert Frost, found traditional forms so helpful, they rarely or never wrote anything else.

So if you’re looking for helpful constraints, you could do worse than try a sonnet, haiku, or villanelle.

On the other hand, free verse doesn’t at first seem to have constraints to help you along.

It is, after all, called free verse…

But actually, there are plenty of “rules” that poets set themselves in free verse, exactly because total freedom does not make the best results. The difference from the traditional forms is that you pick and choose which rules you give yourself.

Here are some that you might like to try:

Pick a number of lines per stanza (it’s amazing how powerful this simple tool can be)
Decide the total number of lines or stanzas in advance
Pick a dominant line length for the whole poem
Alternate long and short lines
Repeat a pattern of line lengths in every stanza—with or without syllable counts
Use anaphora (repeated words at the start of sentences)
Make the poem have some kind of “shape” on the page
Try to make the poem re-create the movement of thought, using line breaks, indentation, tabs, italics, etc.
Write a dramatic monologue
Use only questions.

There are many, many more—see what you can find other poets doing!

Approach

“Approach” is not a very technical word! But there is another kind of constraint that doesn’t have a great name, but is important: the kinds of rules or choices that you make about your aims or methods for the poem.

In my “house” example above, the last part said, “write from the point of view of the house.” This is an “approach” constraint: it’s not about form or topic, but it is setting up a fence for you to jump over creatively.

Some kinds of “approaches” you might use as constraints are:

Choosing what point of view to write from
Aiming to give the poem a particular tone or “feel” (since this will constrain your choices in the poem)
Deciding what kind of voice to use (conversational, reflective, excited…).
Deciding what kinds of language to use (flowery, plain, found…)
How to handle time—maybe focusing on one moment, maybe flitting quickly across many years.

Any aim you set for your poem, or any rule about how you’re going to construct it, can be a useful constraint.

Word-based

A fun variation on constraints is to set yourself some “rules” about the words you’re going to use.

For example:

You have to use the word “yellow” exactly three times
The last word of each sentence must be the same
The first line must end with particular words (“… was stone and water,” was one I used once)
The first and last words of the poem must start with z, q, or x
You make a list of words starting with the letter P and have to use at least 5 of them in the poem
You can’t use “I”
Every stanza must contain the name of a city or country.

These can make the writing a kind of game or puzzle, which is a great idea: your creativity loves to play (think of children), and it will engage gleefully with this kind of task.

When to use constraints

Lastly, when can you use constraints to free you up?

Anytime!

I tend to find they work best at the start of the drafting process, to get me excited about the poem.

But there’s also immense value in using them later on, too:

If your draft isn’t taking off, add constraints to wake up your creativity and set it galloping.
If you’re not enjoying your poem, use the fun constraints to lighten things up.
If the poem feels too loose and flabby, add formal constraints to tighten it up and get extra ideas going too.
(I say more about this in my free ebook, 8 Steps to Better Poems).

Next Steps

Take a poem topic that you’ve been thinking of writing, but haven’t tackled yet. Write it at the top of a page.
Make a list of extra topic constraints you could add to make this topic narrower (as I did with “snow” above). Continue until you get one that excites you.
Now add 3 other kinds of constraint as well:
—an Approach constraint, e.g. picking an unusual point of view
—a Form constraint, e.g. deciding what line lengths to use
—a Word constraint, e.g. 3 words you’re going to repeat 3 times each.
Then start, and let the constraints send your creativity into the sky!