Alex Washoe, a writer I follow on Facebook, posted this quote the other day:
Your style is a function of your limitations, more so than a function of your skills.
– Johnny Cash
It got me to thinking, which was her purpose in posting. It’s certainly something that applies to all kinds of artists.
There are many different kinds of limitations. I recently finished the book What Can A Body Do? How We Meet the Built World by Sara Hendren, who teaches design for disability at Olin College of Engineering. The book is much more than an explanation of cool methods developed to address various disabilities (created both individually and as systems); it also gets into discussions of social and philosophical complexities.
For example, she discusses the experience of Audre Lorde, who had a mastectomy and declined to use a prosthetic, only to discover the expectation that she should wear one to make other people comfortable even if it was not comfortable for her. Hendren observes:
Her post-op prescription for prosthetics was never solely about functionality; it carried a social meaning.
And a discussion of humans as tool users – one of the most basic things we do – leads her to muse “your everyday life offers non-stop evidence that the body-plus may actually be the human’s truest state.”
Because I’d recently read the book, my first reaction to the word limitations was to think of those that come with every human body. Even if you aren’t disabled, there are things your body won’t do that someone else’s does easily.
Some people are very physically flexible; others will never be no matter how much stretching they may do. Certain activities require certain body types – ballet dancers are a good example, one made most stark by the fact that so many of them are retired by the time they are forty because even with the perfect body they are doing things that cannot be sustained into old age.
However, a lot of people who have a passion for dance have found ways around that, ways that incorporate their limitations. There are dancers who perform in wheelchairs, dancers that have curvy bodies and big hips, dancers who are not remotely young. Their limitations are part of their style.
A singer might have a voice others find pleasing, but still have a limited range, which affects the songs they sing and the way they sing them. That is style. In fact, there are some singers whose voice is not necessarily pleasing to all – Bob Dylan comes to mind – who make a virtue of that necessity.
Of course, there are also the limits that come from a desire to create coupled with a lack of ability in one direction or another. I am a writer in great part because writing is something I can do, something I’ve always known I could do. There are other things I lack a feel for, such as painting or dance.
I’m a physical person, but I don’t have any underlying feeling of how I might express myself in movement in a way similar to the way I can express myself in words. Focusing on what I can do is one way of recognizing limitations.
But then there are the other kinds of limitations, the ones imposed by structures and rules, by genres, by language, by the medium you work in.
I’ve ventured into poetry and studied some of the forms. As some of you know, I’ve been writing a senryu every morning, keeping to the 5-7-5 syllable rule. (Senryu are related to haiku, but about more subjects and have more room for irony. My favorite closing line is “not civilized yet.”)
My goal is to express what’s on my mind each morning within the limits of those syllables. Sometimes I succeed.
Applying the limits of a particular form can show you something new about the work you’re doing. Flash fiction is a similar process – tell a whole story in under a thousand words. Or under five hundred. Or maybe in six words.
Set a limit and discover something about what you’re trying to do.
So, black and white photography in a world where everyone has a color camera on their phone. Or drawing with pencil and creating texture with the lines you include and the ones you leave out.
Singing only songs you wrote. Singing only country music. Or only opera.
The limits – whether accepted ones or ones you set – define the work and define your style.
I’ve always been intrigued by writers who manage to write a whole book without using the letter “e” (which I believe is the most common letter in English). Or those who write a whole book in one sentence.
I can conceive of doing the latter; the former would require too much attention on something that doesn’t interest me much. Though writing one hundred-thousand word sentence doesn’t really appeal to me either.
Much as I like sentences full of parenthetical observations – I will give up my em-dashes when you pry them out of my cold, dead hands – I do a lot of short sentences. I like short sentences. Not Hemingway-short, but not so long that you can’t remember the beginning when you get to the end.
The thing is, we’ve all got limitations on what our minds and bodies can do, not to mention what our minds and bodies like to do. And when we set out to be creative, we set various kinds of limits for our work depending on what we want to accomplish with it.
Both kinds of limitations create our style. And because we’re all different in what we come with and what limits appeal to us, we get great – maybe even infinite – variety in the arts.
That’s one of the things that makes art wonderful.