...the imagination is unleashed by constraints. You break out of the box by stepping into shackles.

THE PRINCIPLE OF CREATIVE LIMITATION Limitation is vital. The first step toward a well-told story is to create a small, knowable world. Artists by nature crave freedom, so the principle that the structure/setting relationship restricts creative choices may stir the rebel in you. With a closer look, however, you’ll see that this relationship couldn’t be more positive. The constraint that setting imposes on story design doesn’t inhibit creativity; it inspires it.

Consider establishing a consistent framework around your creative process. It is often the case that the more set in your personal regimen, the more freedom you have within that structure to express yourself. Discipline and freedom seem like opposites. In reality, they are partners.

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

"It is necessary to create constraints, in order to invent freely. In poetry the constraint can be imposed by meter, foot, rhyme, by what has been called the "verse according to the ear."... In fiction, the surrounding world provides the constraint. This has nothing to do with realism... A completely unreal world can be constructed, in which asses fly and princesses are restored to life by a kiss; but that world, purely possible and unrealistic, must exist according to structures defined at the outset (we have to know whether it is a world where a princess can be restored to life only by the kiss of a prince, or also by that of a witch, and whether the princess's kiss transforms only frogs into princes or also, for example, armadillos)."

Nothing exceeds the license occasionally taken by the imagination of very rigid people.

Sometimes I think I’m restrained by information — that I’m too focused on the finer points of things, too detail-minded, unable to free myself from the hold of other people’s work.

We assume that rules will irremediably inhibit what would otherwise be the boundless and intrinsic creativity of our children, even though the scientific literature clearly indicates, first, that creativity beyond the trivial is shockingly rare96 and, second, that strict limitations facilitate rather than inhibit creative achievement.

At first, when an idea, a poem, or the desire to write takes hold of you, work is a pleasure, a delight, and your enthusiasm knows no bounds. But later on you work with difficulty, doggedly, desperately. For once you have committed yourself to a particular work, inspiration changes its form and becomes an obsession, like a love-affair… which haunts you night and day! Once at grips with a work, we must master it completely before we can recover our idleness.

Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

Telling yourself you have all the time in the world, all the money in the world, all the colors in the palette, anything you want — that just kills creativity.” — Jack White

"Creativity is, by its nature, fitful and inconstant, easily upset by constraint, foreboding, insecurity, external pressure. Any great preoccupation with the problems of ensuring animal survival exhausts the energies and disturbs the receptivity of the sensitive mind. Such creativity as was first achieved in the city came about largely through an arrogation of the economic means of production and distribution by a small minority, attached to the temple and the palace. In the epic of creation Marduk remarks of man: "Let him be burdened with the toil of the gods that they may freely breathe." Shall we err greatly if we translate this as: "Let our subjects be burdened with daily toil that the king and the priesthood may freely breathe"?"

How true is the saying that man was forced to invent work in order to escape the strain of having to think.

If imagination is not set to the task of building a creative life, it busies itself with weaving a web of inner fears and doubts, blame and excuse. — LAURENCE G. BOLDT