Limit Lines

On feeling squeezed.

I recently heard a writing teacher instruct her class to write from the heart, and it made me so mad. It’s just terrible advice. Similar to telling someone in the open ocean to swim from the heart. Sounds like a surefire way to panic and drown.

​Here’s better advice: write a poem that has a whale in it. Make it ten lines and try to mention the words blue, brine, and cuttlefish. List one shocking fact. Now, see if you swim.

When driving, they say to look down when oncoming cars have their brights on. If you look straight ahead, you might get blinded and veer off the road. Instead, look down at the white limit lines along the asphalt and simply try to keep from going over them.

Once, when I was experiencing some very intense writer's block, poet (and Patron Saint of Good Ideas) Camille Dungy gave me a prompt on the fly. It was a really excellent prompt about place and memory, and I went home convinced I finally had what I needed to write. That night, I wrote an entirely different poem about an ex’s relapse, wood frogs, and how I felt like I’d miscarried a marriage. Resisting Camille’s very good prompt revealed what I actually wanted to write about. It gave me limit lines.

The natural state of humans is resistance. In parenting, you give your child rules and even if they choose to defy them as an adult, they still benefit from the limit line. Structure is both clarifying and generative.

Similarly, people tell me all the time that they don't have time to write. But in my experience, we always write more in the busiest times of our lives—when we have to shove poems in between meetings or on lunch break or in the 6 minutes before the alarm goes off. We need the squeeze. It makes us swim.

Here’s what I know: creativity demands constraint. Innovation requires convention. Love begs a boundary.

So find your limit line. Keep your edge in sight and write.

​Poem on,
Joy

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Need a squeeze in your writing life? My online writing community, Sustenance, is open for enrollment. Writing is hard. Don’t do it alone.