On a creative writing (fiction) course I embarked on recently, the tutor set us an assignment in which we had to write three articles on a theme, of only 100 words each. Limiting a piece of writing to 100 words is at once both liberating and terrifying. Liberating because you know that you are not allowed to drone on for pages and pages; terrifying because each word has to be absolutely precise. There is no room for waffle, or vagueness. I'm going to use this constraint for a couple of books I'm working on: it makes the task seem doable.