Constraints make things interesting

This is a saying stolen and adapted from the splendid Paynter people. I talk about it in the Do Interesting book. And I've been thinking of it because I've been reading Inside The Box by David Epstein. It's about the fact that freedom doesn't make you more creative etc, constraints do. Relatively well-trodden territory but he has some good accompanying stories and he tells them well.I was trying to think what constraints I use to make things interesting and I came up with these three examples. I'll confess, I've never made any of them stick as much as I'd like because, well, constraints are hard. But I still think they're worth a go:Unusual word insertmentI used to have a challenge with a writer I worked with. We'd both give each other an unusual word and we had to try and get it into the copy we were writing each month. Webcopy, marketing emails, that kind of thing. No one else knew about it so the copy had to get through all the usual approval processes.We didn't do it as often as…