I’m listening to Haruki Murakami’s Novelist as a Vocation while I mop the floor. It’s awesome.
I just came across two things I’m interested in. Murakami describes how he wasn’t happy with his first novel, written in Japanese. He tried retelling the first chapter by writing it in English instead of Japanese. His English was serviceable but limited. His vocabulary in English much smaller than in Japanese and his tool kit for syntax even more limited.
This raised two things that come up for me frequently in whatever I’m doing: 1) the utility of creative constraints and 2) putting work through a particular, unique, standardized filter of your own making to help solidify your voice or style.
In any medium I’m trying to work in, I find more and more value in the imposition of creative constraints. Either imposing them artificially or embracing them when they come up naturally. Music production is my best example. Producers often suffer badly with what we call “Gear Acquisition Syndrome.” It’s very easy to spend all the creative energy you’ve got available researching and acquiring new gear.
I love vintage keyboard instruments. Or new ones. Really any keys or synths, I’m in. I could easily spend all my time chasing down vintage instruments or building the ultimate Eurorack rig. The creative energy would all go toward bringing in new gear and learning how to get the sound I want out of it, without ever completing a track. To make sure that doesn’t happen, I have imposed a completely arbitrary and unnecessary constraint on myself: the only keys I use are Arturia soft synths and vintage emulators. That’s it. One brand, one process, one update manager application. Intentionally constraining myself in that way prevents me from a multi-year bout of Gear Acquisition Syndrome.
To Murakami’s other point about finding a voice through a filtering process, such as the way he retold his novel in English and then translated the English into Japanese, I love that and do weird things like that all the time. One example is from photography. I like to take photos on 35mm film and then photograph those negatives with a digital camera before I work with them. I could take them natively digital, sure. Just like Murakami could have written (and does write mostly) natively in Japanese. But sometimes putting yourself through a limiting process that you impose on yourself, a filter, helps you to squeeze a style out of your own work that you identify with that turns into your voice or your aesthetic whether you continue to create that way or not.