I want to write a song. This is nothing new. All too often, when I sit down with my guitar and notebook, I find myself trapped in the jaws of writer’s block. I may land on a small melodic or lyrical section I like, but then I struggle to come up with anything I consider good enough to follow it. Time after time, perfectionism stifles creation; I get so attached to the hope of writing something wonderful that I overthink it and end up barely writing anything at all. My creative possibilities are endless, but when I fixate on an unattainable ideal, these possibilities can never come to fruition.
However, when I had the opportunity to write a song as part of my final project for an English course last semester, I was surprised by how quickly it took shape. Instead of spending months agonizing over one melody line, unable to figure out why it wasn’t working or what I could do to fix it, I wrote a full song in a week (finals week, no less). It was far from perfect, but it was complete, which was notable because it was the first song I had finished in almost a year. I attribute this small victory to my constraints, especially the time constraint imposed by the impending deadline. Whenever I got stuck, I knew I had to push through and come up with something instead of holding out for perfection.
A deadline is only one type of constraint. Other types of potentially helpful constraints include limitations on material, form or subject matter. Once, inspired by Erik Didriksen’s Pop Sonnets, I rewrote Taylor Swift’s “You Belong With Me” in the style of a Shakespearean sonnet. Though it took significant time and thought to shape Swift’s lyrics into rhyming lines of iambic pentameter, I felt fully engaged in the project for hours, without a trace of writer’s block. Because the poetic form and the gist of the lyrics were already determined, the project felt much less overwhelming than writing something from scratch. Giving a framework to creativity — especially for a light, humorous project like this — makes it easier to focus on the creation itself rather than getting bogged down in details.
Creative constraints help me overcome perfectionism because they keep me focused on possibilities I can achieve rather than ideals that are out of my reach. When I sit down with my guitar and decide to write ‘a song,’ the options for chord progressions, melodies, rhyme schemes and subject matter are endless. This freedom is overwhelming because anything I create will inevitably fall short of some intangible, imaginary song that I could theoretically write. Far from stifling my creativity, imposing constraints helps my creative work flourish by giving me a substantial goal to work toward. Because the task was so specific and actionable, writing a Taylor Swift song as a sonnet felt much more approachable than the broader task of writing a poem.
In a way, perfectionism itself is a constraint. Any time I create any kind of art, I am constrained (to varying degrees, depending on the seriousness of the project) by my desire to create something good. Just as I can’t paint using red if I am given an entirely blue palette, I won’t include a lyric I dislike in a song I want to be proud of. Personal taste is the most basic of constraints, guiding us toward our creative visions. Without it, there is no driving purpose in the process of creation. However, for creativity to thrive, personal taste must not cross the line into perfectionism. This is why it helps to impose other constraints, such as deadlines or poetic forms, that take precedence over striving for perfection. When I wrote a song in a week for my final project, the looming deadline meant it was far more important for the song to exist than for it to be excellent, and that pressure helped me push through moments of dissatisfaction to complete the song.
Of course, all too often, constraints (especially time constraints) work in the opposite direction. When I’m short on time, songwriting and other forms of creativity can fall by the wayside entirely. I believe the solution is to find constraints that are motivating enough to overpower perfectionism, but not so restrictive that they make the creative task impossible. When I carve out some time and commit to finishing a song, what I end up with may not be perfect, but it exists, which is what really matters.
Raina Lockwood is a member of the Class of 2027 in the College of Arts and Sciences. She is a contributor for the Arts & Culture department and can be reached at rl978@cornell.edu.
