No sooner had I posted about boundaries and creativity than I found this excellent article by Richard Rosenbaum on game-changing use of genre conventions. It sharpened my understanding of how boundaries lead to new boundaries, and thus not only support but drive creativity.
Genre conventions are among the most important creative boundaries. They let you know what your audience expects, and so are important in satisfying your audience. They are shortcuts for audience understanding – if your genre has a convention that orange women are always villains, then your audience gains a lot of information just from you saying ‘she was orange’.
This also applies to conventions of your medium, for example the use of chapter breaks and brightly coloured covers in printed novels, or particular edits in film.
Rosenbaum’s article discusses genre conventions used in unusual ways to create great storytelling. The examples he uses – primarily an episode of House and the film The Cabin In The Woods – don’t break the conventions of their genre and medium, but instead explore them, working out their logical implications or applying them in new ways. This creates new rules – in the House case the appearance of memory gaps at particular points, in Cabin a meta-narrative about the nature of horror films – that others can play with. New boundaries and structures emerge not by breaking the old rules, but by following them in a way no-one has before.
This doesn’t just apply to story-telling. Nick responded to my last post by saying that the benefits of boundaries apply in design work. And following rules to create new ones applies there too. Manned flight started out pretty crudely, but with a series of boundaries, rules for what would make a flying machine. By following those rules, and trying out different ways of following them, engineers refined them and varied them, discovering even better ways to build a flying machine. Sure, we still don’t have our Marty McFly hoverboards, but we’ve moved on a long way from the Wright Brothers.
Boundaries aren’t just structures that support creativity. A lot of the time they are creativity. They are the structures we create, within our stories, our genres, our world, that allow us to create greater things. Through those boundaries, creativity becomes self-perpetuating.
Or does it? Let me know what you think below, whether it’s about boundaries, creativity, or The Cabin In The Woods – seriously, I could talk about that film all day.