Limit Yourself to Free Your Creativity

Have you ever found yourself listening to someone speak, or reading an article and nodding your head like a bobblehead doll on a dashboard? That was me during this Ted Talk from Phil Hansen.




The short version: he developed a hand tremor that killed his dream of becoming an artist. After three years, he couldn't bare to be away from art any longer and went to see a neurologist who jokingly said, "Why don't you embrace the shake?" And he did. He learned to embrace his tremor. He started creating art with the squiggles. Then he went a step further and started to limit his ideas in other ways. "What if I only created art with items that would disappear?" "What if I made art with hamburger grease?" (he really did) "What if I could only make art using paint on the side of my hand and karate chops?"

While I'm not nearly as creative as this guy, I do like to see what can be created/written with limits. I love challenges, contests and such. Times where the challenge is to write on a serious deadline, or using only 100 words, or during a 60 second timer.

I'm going to start thinking of more limits for myself.
"What if I could only write a story using dialog?"
"What if I only had a week to write a novella?"

Every year, I participate in NaNoWriMo because writing a novel in a month is a huge rush for me. I love the sense of community found on Twitter and in the forums. I want to find more things like this. Lately, I'm fascinated by the 3 day novel concept, but don't want to spend the fee.

If anyone knows of a writing challenge, I'd love to hear about it. Maybe I'll make up my own challenge here and others can join me!

Let me know of ways that you limit yourself. Did the Ted Talk inspire you to find out how you'd cope with self-imposed limits?

Chat with me below! I'm a bit of an attention whore and would love to hear from you!