Limitations

Everything is permissible, but not everything is beneficial. - St. Paul

Limitations are more interesting than powers. - Sanderson's Second Law

I have no answers for what I am about to muse over. The technology of printing and our culture have changed so much that the restrictions of topic and of space are no longer concerns for the writer. But a key part of the creative process is figuring out how to accomplish your goal within the limitations of the medium. You hear this in such maxims as "necessity is the mother of invention."

The Shadow radio show had to figure out how to kill their villains without the hero's gunplay. Silver screen romances had to sizzle without resorting to bedroom scenes. And horror movies had to convey terror without showing the monster--often because the physical effects of the time weren't up to the task. In all cases, the way these stories were told were affected by the limitations of their time, and the writers rose to the challenge. The Shadow developed his mentalist powers. Romances like Casablanca, Gone With the Wind, and Charade still linger in the popular imagination, long after today's chick flicks are forgotten. And the power of indirect terror is such that, even in these days where CG can do just about anything, critics still proclaim "Never show the monster" because the scare factor is greater.

Limitations force creativity.

The question now is how to find these limits without making them artificial and forced. Such devices as the all dialogue story force technique, but when read, come off as literary conceits instead of actual stories. (John Ringo's Black Tide Rising series is a rare exception.) Limiting yourself to specific points of view can help develop skill, such as first-person (I did this), second-person (you did this), and third-person (he did this), but when bundled in three codas such as in John Scalzi's Redshirts, these become insufferable. These self-imposed limitations do help to sharpen technique, but often serve poorly as stories in and of themselves. Just as the musician is challenged to practice his technical scales with musicality, so should these writing exercises be filled with story. In practice, however, this is rarely the case.

Perhaps the only real market limitation that still lasts is that of short fiction. The word limit, whether of 100 word drabbles, 1000 word flash fiction, or 6000 word short stories, forces the writer to prioritize plot, description, and even sentence structure to fit the most meaning into the smallest space. The ancient model, now fifty years out of date, of writers toiling in the short fiction markets before writing novels, at least imposed a discipline that could be scaled up to larger lengths. Now, the expectation for writers to serve story in novel-length chunks, even when committing fan-fiction. There is little market, or incentive for the writer to toy with the short story. (Hopefully, the new short fiction boom finds customers.)

In thinking about the 70s' effects on writing and the weird genres, I've previously noted how the economy led publishers to desire longer stories. Novel lengths climbed from 60k words, to 80k, then 100-120k, and even 300k in certain Books of Endless Pages. This increase has been proposed as one possibility as to why pulp fiction fell by the wayside, as it is difficult to shoehorn multiple 50k-60k pulp novels into an 80k paperback. But what of the effect on the writing itself? What happens when the tight space requirements of the magazines give way? It should be no surprise that the space fills with the onanism of the sentence cult, the messengering of the propagandist, the blow by blow lists of the action junkie, the digressions of the world builder, and every leaf of the scenery artist. The discipline of the short stories has been lost, first by the gatekeepers and then by the removal of the gatekeepers in the independent market, and thus, much of the creativity.

Again, I have no answers here to impose limits on the market, and thus creativity. But perhaps better minds may bend themselves to the task.