Every once in a while I run across a piece of writing advice that strikes me as absolutely right and highly usable, the perfect “gadget” for prying me out of a tight writing spot. Who knows if others would find these particular “gadgets” as useful as I do; I sometimes suspect I value them because they came to me with the perfect slant or solution for what I was working on at the time.

At any rate, recently I came across one of these useful tidbits of advice in a YouTube clip of Heidi Julavits. She suggests that it’s useful to think about what a story’s “container” is, as a guide to choosing what should or shouldn’t be included. What an elegant concept. Given that a writer can always choose to write about anything, Julavits asks: “How do you productively limit your possibilities?” What belongs? What doesn’t? What will make your particular container burst, or bulge, or leak?