This is not the first year I fancied myself a writer.

In October 2012, I began a document on my computer called “Unconstrained Writing”. The idea here seemed to be that my earlier attempts at writing fizzled out quickly because I was paralysed by the notion that they had to be polished and make sense, and if I just abandoned that constraint, I could write much more freely. All the burgeoning thoughts pent up behind the dam of presentability could finally burst forth in a mighty torrent of verbiage. Then I could sift through the silt and polish up the pearls later.

And so I sat down and through sheer willpower I produced four paragraphs’ worth of material. A sample passage:

If the customers are to be kept waiting, make sure they have something to entertain themselves. Tearfully, the couple kissed each other adieu as the wife boarded the train. The fly on the window instantly flew off when it heard the gunshot. Above all, maintain diplomatic relations.

And it continued, on and on like that, in much the same vein. A page of relentlessly schizophrenic but curiously detached narration, and every line a non sequitur. Snippets of scenes cobbled from various experimental films unspooling in my head. Unadorned passing thoughts (Never touch that button) interspersed with Mad Libs-style madness. Many people have speculated that Fudge-Rabbit Disease could be cured if only there were creamy sausages around. Text steeped in the faint aroma of procedural generation, nouns and adjectives plucked indifferently from whatever clouds of lexical space my train of thought passed by. No, because apparently they have tried it already and it resulted in a kitten milkshake.

Eventually this silly randomness crystallised into the point of the piece and became the order of the day. The sensation of endless non-sequiturs, high-frequency whiplash, became deliberate. I found myself shuffling sentences around when I noticed that two neighbouring sentences might be too closely related to each other. Unwittingly I had fashioned an entirely new constraint for myself: each new sentence must be far enough from the previous sentence in content, style, genre.

After four paragraphs of this it dawned on me that I had completely betrayed my original intent for the document, only nominally preserved in its title. A casual potpourri of unedited, unconstrained writing had given way to a highly constrained concept piece. No longer did I feel free to add new sentences to the repository, and I think it was at this point that I abandoned it for good.

Happy 10th birthday, “Unconstrained Writing”!