Creative Limitations
I’m currently reading Robert McKee’s Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting (HarperEntertainment, 1997), and find his comments on creative limitations particularly useful as I start on a new novel.
I’ve decided to do as he suggest here in the video, and in more detail in the book: I’m going to straight-jacket myself into a story world so specific, so exact, that I don’t have wiggle room to fudge questions like timeline, time of day, season, politics, jobs or anything else.
In the book, McKee likens this to a poet choosing a stringent form in order to force himself into his deepest creativity.
As McKee points out in the video, writers often resent restraint, feeling it will hamper their creativity. I’ve resisted being too specific, thinking I would figure it out later, and have learned from sad experience that it never seems to work that way. Instead, I wind up hopelessly muddled, with a set of events that can’t all happen in the same story world/timeline, and without which, I have no story.
So for now, I’ll resist the urge to write scenes and instead work on my wrap-around jacket. I’m planning to write a detailed biography of each major character, pick a window of dates in a particular year in which the “current time” action will take place, and lock in the physical world my characters inhabit.
I will know I’ve successfully completed this step when I can write any scene I need without bumping into unanswered questions about the story world. And since deadlines help, I’m setting a few to keep myself from using this process for the purposes of procrastination.