Freedom is Bad for Creativity

To come up with fresher, more original ideas, impose some constraints.

In 1957, Random House publisher Bennett Cerf made a wager with one of his authors. He bet Theodor Seuss Geisel—better known as Dr. Seuss—that he couldn’t write a children’s book using 50 words or fewer. 

An earlier book by Geisel, The Cat in the Hat, had employed an already-spare 236 words, selected from a list created by educators for children learning to read. Could the author write a book using only a fraction of that number? Geisel bet that he could.

It wasn’t easy. "He really agonizes over this book," relates Brian Jay Jones, Geisel’s biographer. “He ends up putting maps up on the wall of his vocabulary words, and he has flow charts—it’s a math problem for him part of the time.” Geisel prevailed over the challenge, and in 1960, Random House published the result: Green Eggs and Ham, a book that became a beloved classic. 

This episode gave Catrinel Tromp, a psychologist at Rider University, the name for a theory she was developing about how the imposition of constraints can actually make us more creative. She called it the Green Eggs and Ham hypothesis.

Tromp’s theory goes against popular notions about how creativity is best achieved. Many of us assume that the ideal creative process is unstructured, open-ended, and free of external limitations.

But research by Tromp and many others finds that when we must work within constraints—imposed either by the task itself, or by us as creators—we come up with fresher, more original ideas. Why would this be? 

When we face an ill-defined problem and a wide-open solution field—a blank page or an empty canvas—we reach for the associations that come first to mind; we gravitate toward the responses that have worked well for us before. That’s a prescription for clichés and familiar do-overs. 

Constraints exert a forcing function: they make us look farther afield, for solutions that will satisfy a particular set of demands. The domains in which we search for those solutions are fewer in number, and so we search those domains more deeply. We tap knowledge that has previously gone unused; we re-organize and re-structure that knowledge; we come up with ingenious new associations and connections.

Research has found that the most creative people are especially adept at what psychologists call “constraint handling.” Here are five steps for handling constraints in ways that will make you more creative.

One: Start thinking about constraints early in the creative process. This turns on its head the usual practice, in which we give ourselves unlimited freedom at the outset and only bring in constraints (“this won’t work, and that won’t work”) when we’re judging our ideas toward the end. Research finds that constraints serve their forcing function most effectively when they are introduced and considered early on in the process.

Two: Evoke your constraints, and then write them down. Brainstorm a list of your constraints in the same way you would brainstorm new ideas. Write them down, and post them near the place where you’re working. The idea is make constraints as visible and conscious as possible, so that you know what you’re working with and around.

While writing this post, for example, I have to work within the following constraints—imposed by me, and by the nature of the genre: 1) It can’t be too long. 2) It has to be research-based. 3) It has to be accessible and not too wonky. 4) It has to be practical and useful. I was tacitly aware of these constraints when I sat down at my computer, but I find that it’s enormously helpful to articulate them explicitly.

Three: Try to find the “sweet spot” of not too many constraints, and not too few. Research suggests that we should formulate our creative project such that it is “moderately closed”—that is, structured to an extent that is useful, but not so hemmed in that we have no freedom to experiment. 

Four: To achieve this ideal level of “constrainedness,” impose your own chosen constraints. Constraints come in two flavors: exclusionary constraints, and focusing constraints. Exclusionary constraints dictate: You can’t do this (e.g., don’t use any color, only black and white). Focusing constraints suggest: Train your attention on this domain more than others (e.g., explore in depth the many shades of blue). Some research suggests that focusing constraints are more helpful in facilitating creativity than exclusionary constraints.

Five: Adopt a friendly, cooperative attitude toward the constraints on your creative project. It’s possible to look at constraints not as limitsm but as tools—tools you employ to stake out new creative territory. 

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Bonus: Try using chance to impose a constraint on the tendency to revert to well-practiced approaches.  The twentieth-century composer John Cage used the I Ching, a Chinese divination tool, to “free himself from his tastes” and compose a piece of music that was utterly new and fresh. The result was Music of Changes, a work completed in 1951. Of course, it’s our taste—our particular sensibility as a creator—that makes a work distinctly ours. But when we’ve fallen into a rut of relying on familiar, well-practiced moves, mixing things up with an element of chance can inject our process with some needed novelty. Try choosing a word at random out of the dictionary to work into your next sentence, or try rolling a die to determine your next step. The author Paul Bowles was said to work incidents from his daily life into the plots of his novels—giving them the authentically accidental feel of real life. 

How about you—have you found that constraints have helped you to be more creative?