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Steven Ellett
Ms. Tillery
British Literature
13 October 2011
Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory of the Coming of the Lord.
Writers often face many constraints along the process of making their products.
Some of these constraints lead to changing the nature of the piece. Constraints come in
many forms and often from many sources. Constraints vary in magnitude, but amount to
about the same thing: more thoughts to think.
The biggest constraint on all writers is the rules. Whether the writing is for a
teacher or for a newspaper or even for a book, it must follow the established protocol of
communication set down by the inventors and maintainers of the mass communication
medium with which we all convey information otherwise known as English grammar, to
a greater or lesser degree. Establishing an idea is very important. Consistency can
become difficult when an idea does not take form in a manner that the author can express
in the original form. Language is a medium, not a constant. Therefore one may not
always get an idea in the form of language and may need to translate.
Dreams are a good example of an inspiration that is not always in plain english,
and beyond that not always delivered in a manner that makes sense. In dreams, the idea
may ignore some rules of the physical world that one may know to be true and dear. In a
dream, a phrase that makes perfect sense in the dream with the dream's physics and plot
may make no sense at all once awake and recalling it. And from personal experiences,
something that may sound poetic and even rhyme, may sound like total garbage later. For

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some reason dreams, though a great source of potential inspiration, are very difficult to
grasp.
“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be
original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it
has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having
noticed it.” (C.S. Lewis) Sadly it does seem that most original ideas seem to be used, as
Ms. Tillery has pointed out, even the ones from dreams usually start to conform to a
previously visited theme, but the only way to tell with some things is by boiling it down
into an expository paper. In the best conceivable terms, that means that there are no
original writers; merely a very large lot of extremely clever plagiarists. As author
Stephen King wrote,
Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story
Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite
literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously
unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job
isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up. (On Writing
2000, p.37).
Therein lies the problem with writing a science fiction novel. It leaves two
choices, either create a fantastic context for an old story or have something that is of very
little substance. Most science fiction can be related to some kind of old story or at least a
simple story idea. Otherwise it seems that the readers are only in it for the technical
jargon. So it needs a plot; an idea. For instance I, Robot has a theme that could be
interpreted as an allusion to racism.

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Star wars also has a plot that could be applied elsewhere; boy wants adventure,
adventure finds and overwhelms him, old man takes him under his wing, they fight evil,
they rescue the damsel in distress, they destroy evil, happy day. Though without the
scientific add ons it is a simple plot line, it is nonetheless a reasonably successful one.
So essentially the way to avoid the complete and total lack of originality in the
story lines is by changing the details. At this point the writer can change the time, the
era, and all sorts of other details that effect the perception. He or she can add details to
make it follow a particular political agenda or reflect some historical event, with just
enough clues for a literature teacher to pick up on the allusion.
Writing in general seems to be an art form that gets far too much objectivity
associated with it. Writing is an emotional activity that has to appeal primarily to the
author's sense of beauty. Secondly, writing fiction requires some need to bend the rules of
society, even if only a little.
Society itself can often become a constraint on writing. Public reaction, or fear of
public reaction to a particular subject or opinion, can dictate the ideas that an author will
go through with writing. Religion seems to be the most powerful stopper of writers who
consider public opinion. This may also be due to their fears of becoming unpopular. It is
not that they don't talk about it at all, only that they often sugarcoat it with unusual
context. A counterexample that comes to mind is in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
when Douglas Adams writes that God “... promptly vanish[ed] in a puff of logic”
(Adams , pg. 42)
Other constraints that writers often face are the ones they place on themselves.
For instance, in nineteen thirty-nine, Ernest Vincent Wright wrote the book Gadsby

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without using the letter “E” once. The word that has been used as the label for this
particular type of constrained story is lipogram, which means missing letter. There are a
whole slew of other such self imposed constraints that can actually have a positive effect
on the reception of a book or piece of writing. The bizarre circumstances aside, Gadsby
has been found to be selling over $4000 per copy. (wiki)
The worst possible constraint: writer's block. Writer's block has variable degrees
of intensity, but it generally amounts to an inability to put anything real on paper.
According to the authors, it is usually caused by what they call a loss of inspiration. It
has been known to last for anywhere from hours to years with causes ranging from lack
of sleep to lack of interest to what they might call a sense of failure. What would also
seem to be a factor in the writer's block is relevance. Often with a topic that does not fully
appeal to the writer, staying on topic can be nearly impossible, depending on the writer.
Over the years people have come up with extremely unusual ways of dealing with
writer's block. Anything from flash cards to focus groups have been made to improve the
odds of beating it.
There also seem to be some legal constraints. Many of these come from the
constraint of the lack of originality. Copyright infringement is sometimes a factor to deal
with when writing a story with references that the author wants the reader to be able to
relate to. If a person wants to reference a song, he needs to get permission from the artist
to use said song, then he needs to write somewhere in their paper an acknowledgement to
the artist and the song for allowing him to use the song in his work of literature. Similar
rules apply when referencing companies or unoriginal characters or even other works of
literature. This does occasionally have an upside to it, however. In a horror novel that

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shall remain unmentioned, a 1950s Plymouth went around terrorizing a town. The author,
Stephen King, of this novel was paid a large sum of cash by the owner of the car
company, Lee Iacocca, to use the car in his book. (King)
“I love deadlines, I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by”(Douglas
Adams). Time can also be a very challenging constraint. For more established authors,
they often are given deadlines at which they need to have another book or part of a book
out by. Generally these have to do with publicity. However, there are also time
constraints that apply to amateur writers as well. Ideas are very time sensitive things.
When an author has an idea, if it is not written down then, it has very high likelihood of
changing. The idea will most likely not be in the same form later as it was originally.
There will be discrepancies, there will be flaws; such is the nature of the mind, it is not
perfect. This idea applies especially to dreams. Dreams become dimmer in one's mind
extremely quickly after waking up. There are also instances, speaking from personal
experiences, when an idea that seems beautiful and grand can simply vanish from
existence; be gone without a trace never to be heard from again.
But with all of this having been said, it does not amount to much when one
considers that anybody who writes, with the exception of high school students, does it for
his or her own enjoyment. Even if they do not enjoy the actual writing part there must
still be some reason they do it, or else they would have picked a different profession. But
for as long as there has been history, there has been someone writing it, and that does not
seem likely to change anytime soon. Excluding, of course, some kind of cataclysmic
event that wipes out all paper and computers in the world.

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Bibliography
king, Stephen.. On Writing. New York City, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2000. Print.
King, Stephen. "INTERVIEW WITH STEPHEN KING ON CHRISTINE." Interview by
Randy Lofficer.
lofficer.com. N.p., 2001. Web. 22 Oct. 2011. <http://www.lofficier.com/
christine.htm>.
Wikipedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Oct. 2011. <http://Wikipedia.org>.
Adams, Douglas. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Stamford, CT: Longmeadow Press,
1979. Print.