Another chance at constrained creativity

Although I’d planned on entering, I narrowly missed the deadline (oops) for 2009 submissions to New Times’ 55 Fiction competition, which calls on readers to submit 55-word fictional stories. So I was excited to hear the announcement of NPR’s Three-Minute Fiction Contest, requiring authors to write stories that can easily be read out loud within three minutes (under 600 words, according to them, but shorter is fine).

It’s interesting to think about how constraints facilitate creativity (I highly recommend this quick read, by the way). The idea of writing a short story of undetermined length, about anything at all, is intimidating (to me, anyway). But tell me that it has to be exactly 55 words, or that it should be readable in three minutes or less, and all kinds of possibilities spring to mind. This is part of what I like about advertising and design in general—art that must also function. And I also wonder if it’s another description of the role of account planners and brand strategists. The creative brief, for example, largely exists to explain constraints to a creative team (e.g., defining what is on- or off-brand, what competitors are doing, and an assessment of what customers will react to positively).

Regardless, I’m looking forward to a spare-time creative opportunity. Hopefully the constraints will steer me toward something a little better than I would’ve produced on my own. I wonder if there are any brilliant Twitter novelists out there yet…

Planning to submit? Get in touch (@RobMeyerson, or comment here) and let me know how it goes.

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Update (6/24): Apparently there is at least one single-tweet novelist out there (which is what I meant by “Twitter novelists): http://twitter.com/TweetNovels.