I started with eight of my favorite books. Of course this list could have been longer. Or shorter. But this exercise was about perimeters, so the cut-off was eight.

Next, I took the first and last sentence from each book, wrote them out, and organized the phrases into a list of words.

Then, I printed the list and cut out each word.

What came next was an exercise in patience, slow and deliberate creativity, and the power of limits. For hours I arranged and rearranged the little words until I made something that felt finished. It was like doing a puzzle where my only reference for what the finished image would look like was a feeling. I would know when it was completed.

I often find myself crippled by choice. While, of course, the freedom of choice is a huge privilege and gift, it can sometimes feel overwhelming. The idea that we can be anything, create anything, do anything is frankly a lot of pressure. How do I choose what is the “most right”? Instead of staring down the barrel of an entire language’s worth of words, I lessened the burden by creating a limit. By giving myself a word bank, I was writing under a pseudonym that happened to be a conglomeration of a few of my favorite authors. When faced with something like a creative slump or writer’s block, sometimes what we need is a thing to overcome. A single problem with infinite solutions. The resistance we face when trying to create with perimeters is, in my opinion, deeply liberating. Without the hard stone to push back against the blade, it does not sharpen.

There is something powerful in creating out of opposition, in creating as a means to overcome, in thinking your way out of the box.