You have something in mind: a scene to paint with color or illustrate with words, or maybe you're a woodworker about to craft a table. The conception phase is free of any judgment and lacks restrictions. As soon as you put the pen to the paper (or the brush to the canvas) reality takes over the vision and puts it into relation to skills, restrictions, and our proclivity to uphold standards outside of our reach.
Today's essay aims to explore that gap between vision and skill, where it comes from, what it entails, and why it might not be such a bad thing after all.
In Defense of Restrictions
The year is 1998. Nintendo is about to release what will be known as one of the best video games of all time; universally praised for its story and revered for its revolutionary gameplay mechanics that inspired generations of games and set new standards in the video game industry that stand to this day (looking at you, Z-Targeting).
I am, of course, talking about The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (OOT). It would not be my personal first 3D Zelda game, as I went on to the sophomore project: The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (MM), solidifying my love for video games at an early age and cementing the curiosity for all things creative and horror related.
MM had massive shoes to fill, and Nintendo wanted to capitalize on their big success by following up with an equally ambitious game. There was a big problem: the game had to be developed in one year. This meant massive restrictions on time and budget, constraints that led to countless other problems.
Nintendo pulled it off and made an equally iconic and defining title. How did they do it? From a creative perspective, they viewed their restrictions not as hurdles on a racetrack to a single finish line, but as guardrails on a wider path that had many goals. MM is a testament to the latter, an example of restrictions making the product unique and into something that audiences will love for years to come. My point is: without restrictions, MM would be different, more polished, have less bite, and would probably feel too sterile for the subject matters it explores. Maybe restrictions are not shackles that bind us to a lower form of expression, but the tools that we need to use.
Master Rules Before Breaking Them
I mentioned Bruce Lee in the first entry to this series on creativity, and I am going to use something I learned in my own study of martial arts to illustrate a powerful concept. First, you master the basics, you learn the rules; then you break them to express yourself.
It is similar in writing. To write a story, you first have to learn the alphabet. Then come words. Then sentences. And then paragraphs, which Stephen King refers to as the "basic unit of writing". From there, the structure is open. It is a very simple idea in concept, but can only be understood when mastering skills in any given field.
If you have mastered the rules, then you are allowed to break them.
The Path to the Top
If skills are the tools we need to achieve our visions, then we must use the tools that we possess to keep moving towards our perceived goals to sharpen them and exchange them on our way to the top with better ones.
My personal practical advice is this: if you want to write, write. If you want to paint, paint. Of course things can be made (and inevitably will be made) infinitely complex by intrinsic and extrinsic forces, but to reach a goal you must seek it out first. The simple version of this MO: Ain't nothin to it but to do it.
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