Beautiful Limitations
… the best creative work is born from some sort of limitation.
“My manager tells me I need to smile more.”
—Kurt CobainI thought a voice had to be about what you could do. It wasn’t until I heard Billie Holiday that I realized a voice could be a collection of compensations for things you couldn’t do. The great singers were also the great interpreters. She had just a single octave, and she made it her lifelong subject. I thought a voice had to be about your fluency, your dexterity, your virtuosity. But in fact your voice could be about your failings, your falterings, your physical limits. The voices that ring hardest in our heads are not the perfect voices. They are the voices with an additional dimension, which is pain.
—Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy
Months before Kurt Cobain’s suicide, Nirvana played an MTV Unplugged performance, closing with a cover of Lead Belly’s ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night?’ If you haven’t seen it before, you can watch it here. Rehearsal’s leading up to the performance were tense; Cobain was jittery and snappy with drug withdrawal and at one point refused to play. He asked for the stage to be decked out with lilies and candles, ‘like a funeral’. The performance as a whole, especially the closing track, would be Kurt’s requiem, released posthumously in the wake of his suicide.
Listen. It is the sound of pain. Cobain is not a gifted singer in the technical sense; he is not a showman nor a virtuoso. Hunched like a cardiganed vulture over his acoustic guitar, his eyes — when he looks at you, which he seldom does — are ice. In the final chorus he jumps up an octave, his voice a chainsaw made of cigarettes, and he hits the word ‘shiver’ so hard that Grohl stops drumming, his voice breaking, blood-lunged.
This is the sound of limitations. Beautiful limitations.
I showed this video to my Y13s to make a point: creating something incredible does not involve access to every resource. On the contrary, the best creative work is born from some sort of limitation. My Y13s were spending too much time with their texts, trying to find the ‘perfect’ quotation; once they had it, they were trying to write the perfect 'essay'. To combat this, I gave them an essay question and then told them to open their texts at random — I believe we were studying A Streetcar Named Desire at the time — and they were only allowed to use those pages as the basis of their essays. They had to make the best of what they had. The essays they turned in were better: sharper, less fussy, clearer, and a few of them said that they’d read the text in new ways because they were forced to look at parts they’d glossed over before in favour of the more familiar.
There are a few other ways in which this approach might be useful in an English setting. In terms of creative writing, one of my favourite techniques is what DBC Pierre in Release the Bats calls ‘the pressure cooker’. The idea is that the best stories are the product of tension, which means that the writer should restrict things as much as possible. Limit the amount of time a character has to figure something out, the amount of physical space they have, how much they know, how much they can see. The more you do this, the more tense and lean the story becomes — the action is taut, tense, hair-trigger. It’s a great way to get students away from baggy plotting.
This is similar to Jacob Ross, who prizes the idea of the ‘singularity’ when crafting a short story: “a single dominant character is confronted with a singular dominant problem or challenge for which there is a single dominant outcome” (from Webb, Teach Like A Writer).
Lastly, it’s worth considering what Lockwood said about Billie Holiday. Holiday helped her realise that the best and most beautiful voices were ‘collections of compensations for things you couldn’t do. She had thought that ‘a voice had to be about your fluency, your dexterity, your virtuosity. But in fact your voice could be about your failings, your falterings, your physical limits.’ This is why I use Cobain as my example, but it’s also because of Lockwood’s final comment: the imperfect voices have ‘an additional dimension, which is pain’. Pain is easy to forget and hard to listen to, but — somehow — it seems to me that it’s where a lot of beauty lives.