I’m still thinking a lot about creative constraints and wanted to explore some more ideas related to my last post.
Last time I asked you to tell me a story with no constraints, then with the constraint of “about a princess and a purple elephant” and remember the difference in those two states. Now think about how different constraints would lead to a completely different outcome - even just changing it to a normal grey elephant sets up a different set of constraints and in the end an entirely different story.
I’m reminded of Ian Malcolm’s explanation of Chaos Theory in the book Jurassic Park by Michael Chrichton. You can read the entire thing here https://jurassicpark.fandom.com/wiki/Chaos_theory but to summarize one of the main points:
If you fire a cannon ball of a certain weight out of a cannon pointed at a certain angle with a certain amount of gunpowder and then fire a slightly differently weighted cannon ball out of a cannon at a slightly different angle with a slightly different amount of gunpowder then you would expect them to land at almost the same spot.
But if you take a complicated system like weather and do the same thing to the temperature, humidity, wind, and other factors you will wind up with vastly different outcomes - a hurricane instead of a sunny day, a vastly different trajectory, or dies out instead of becoming more severe.
Sometimes creative constraints are like the weather system - with a purple elephant your story might be more fantastical, a grey elephant more reality based, and as a result those stories are completely different.
This means it’s worth experimenting with small changes to your constraints to see what happens - it could have a big impact.