A snippet:
"Some years ago I read an interview with Canin in which he [...] claimed he deliberately confined himself to a half hour of writing time per day. The amount of productivity generated by so miniscule an allowance, he said, was astonishing. ... As Canin's notion goes, imposed limitation — in ideas or images, as well as in actual time to create — can galvanize the imagination in ways that, paradoxically, may seldom be experienced by the writer given unlimited creative freedom. ... This idea is not new, of course. The adage 'Resistance sparks the flame' suggests something similar. But such ideas have fallen out of fashion in a contemporary moment geared toward job obsession, 'live/work lifestyles,' and an all-or-nothing approach to most endeavors.Find Poets & Writers on any fine newsstand.
The great lot of us, I'll venture to say, have always got an idea or two simmering on the back burner — but tend to despair of ever realizing them. Our creative sweat and tears, we feel, are sucked dry in making a living. Our time is gobbled up 'on the clock' at work. We embody the modern dichotomy of creative energy at odds with practical demands, and we get...well, depressed. Working for the buck, we feel we've been coerced into betrayal of our own more creative impulses. Our guilt induces inertia.
But how liberating to think that obligatory distractions, 'creative roadblocks,' and the scarcity of time may be made to serve and benefit imaginative production — and not prove strictly detrimental, as many a creative soul tends to believe..."
