If I asked you to write a short text on any topic you want, giving you unlimited time, guess what would happen: you wouldn't write anything. But if I had the ability to pressure you to compose a story using ten randomly chosen words from the 1851 edition of the Byzantine Dictionary by Skarlatos Vyzantios [...] I am sure you would give me something.
Restrictions surprisingly facilitate writing, forcing you to start before you have a chance to think, resulting in you saying things that you didn't expect to hear.
They open doors whose existence you didn't suspect, like those found in horror movies behind big libraries. They allow you to forget the great writers you learned in school or read for your pleasure, and deliver you to yourself in a way. [...]
This volume contains all the texts from the first creative writing seminar I conducted in Athens in January 2013 [...]. I must clarify immediately that I didn't teach anything: I don't believe that literature can be taught, one only learns to write by writing. I reminded the members of this first group that white glue offers them unlimited freedom and asked them to make use of this freedom, that is, their imagination [...]. My role was to find the topics and monitor the time.
But quickly, I was also carried away by the flow and I started writing, because I don't know a better way to spend my time. At the end of the year, we all read our texts, discussed them, went outside to smoke, and started another exercise. We worked at night, from eight to eleven, like burglars. I even thought that creative writing is exactly that, a raid on the literary space, through the service entrance.

Vasilis Alexakis