No Resistance Is Futile
Six(1) words(2) can(3) tell(4) a(5) story(6) (while five is too small). Constraints (write without the letter “e”; use only one-syllable words; make every sentence exactly N words [see Oulipo and Georges Perec]) can force me (and you!) out of windbaggery and make certain things possible. Not long ago, tasked to review 763 songs at a swoop, I cut the review length to six words and suffered not at all.
Now when I face a new writing project, I open a spreadsheet. I want a grid to keep track of sources and dates, or to make certain that the timeline of a story makes sense. The grid imposes brevity. Relationships between sentences are exposed. Editing becomes a more explicit act of sorting, shuffling, balancing paragraphs. In this spirit, I'm rewriting some blog software to read directly from Excel. We'll see how that goes.
Socialist writer and textile artist William Morris said, “You can't have art without resistance in the materials.” Blessed and burdened with the most malleable medium in human history, we are overwhelmed by a surfeit of dross, battered by chatter. There are benefits to gain by adding, in the form of constraints, some resistance to the materials.
Paul Ford is the author of Gary Benchley, Rock Star, an editor at Harper’s Magazine, and sole proprietor of Ftrain.com. Kim Bost is a designer and Assistant Art Director for The New York Times Op-Ed page. For more information, visit KimBost.com.
Remarks 19 total remarks were added before the post was closed.
Wade M
Great article. I'd love to get more information on your excel technique if possible please Paul.
Thanks,
Wade
Dennis Eusebio
I was just recently working on a project where designers were tasked to design something and were given complete free reign.
No one knew where to begin.
Suzie
Fantastic little piece, Mr. Rock Star.
Reihan
Very insightful. I've been trying to impose tighter constraints on myself, and haven't gotten used to the discipline yet, but I'm cautiously optimistic.
I'm hoping to read Ford's manifesto on information design writ large.
Antti Haverinen
I agreed with Wade M. Would you mind if you clarify it concretely more? I could be nice to compare your fantasting idea to my visual sketching...
Paul Ford
For spreadsheet editing I just keep it simple. At work we publish a weekly news summary and everyone works in a spreadsheet with Date, Text, Title, Source, and URL. Add a blank line for paragraphs. That becomes this:
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/03/WeeklyReview2008-03-04
But then because it's pre-diced it also becomes this:
http://harpers.org/subjects/OsamaBinLaden
And thousands of other timelines. My problem is that once the grid is exported it's hard to add more links and cross-references. There's much rebuilding necessary. I want to make it possible for the content to never leave a spreadsheet. Constraints and convenience.
What I plan to do is use Apache POI to automatically translate a spreadsheet into an object that can be handed to an XSL processor to generate HTML (or RDF). I've also been looking at the different editable grids available for JavaScript with the idea that I could keep everything in the browser and have fully-capable textareas, and then I could just stow all my text with git. But I'm suspicious that this would scale to tens of thousands of items. Not sure yet.
Grant
Great article. Usually in design we just limit ourselves by time constraints, budget constraints, etc. But I think some of my best work has been done because of other creative restraints like the sxsw 6-word review example. Without constraints work actually suffers.
Stephen Tiano
Maybe ... but I've rarely read such mechanical-sounding prose.
Oops, 9 words ... and these.
Jack
"Now when I face a new writing project, I open a spreadsheet. I want a grid to keep track of sources and dates, or to make certain that the timeline of a story makes sense. The grid imposes brevity. Relationships between sentences are exposed. Editing becomes a more explicit act of sorting, shuffling, balancing paragraphs."
Please see NoteBox Disorganizer, the spreadsheet for writers:
Abraham
I completely agree. Constraints force thoughtfulness and clarity.
If you can't say it with constraints (particulary length constraints) then you don't know what you want to say yet.
Every post on my blog is 22 words. Doing that for a while makes 200 seem luxurious!
Thanks!
Mark
The form of haiku--
Like banks of a river flows
Creativity
Andrew
Five words can say much.
Four words tell stories.
Four words: stories told.
Three words imply...
Just two -
Or one -
Perkodhuskurunbarggruauyagokgorlayor-
gromgremmitghundhurthrumathunaradidil-
lifaititillibumullunukkunun.
Good discipline, good article, and fun. :-)
John
On the home page, it should be:
"...in short form—200 words or fewer."
Instead of "200 words or less."
Webdesigner
This may be a little off topic, but I really like the simplistic design of this site. Keep the good work up!
Runa
Six word can tell a story. Six words can tell about your whole life. I really liked this piece.
Immortal
You gasp. I sigh. We smoke.
Friseur
Excellent article, thanks for sharing this.
Jacob Halton
Isn't this idea kind of like what they teach us in design school when they force us to handset type, present projects as marker renderings, etc. so we're forced to think and figure out what we're doing instead of just clicking buttons in some Adobe program?
As a side note, even though a lot of us are more creative with restrictions, does anyone ever feel like they put unnecessary restrictions on themselves when they're working?
Thomas
In the German language exists a popular idiom that means:
"In der Kürze
liegt die Würze."
Translated word by word:
"In the shortness
lies the spice."
Or better:
"Brevity is the soul of wit."