No. 06 / Robert McKee, a wise voice on storytelling, highlights an important point:
Robert Frost said that writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down, for it’s the self-imposed, indeed artificial demands of poetic conventions that stir the imagination. Let's say a poet arbitrarily imposes this limit: He decides to write in six-line stanzas, rhyming every other line. After rhyming the fourth line with the second line he reaches the end of a stanza. Backed into this corner, his struggle to rhyme the sixth line with the fourth and second may inspire him to imagine a word that has no relationship to his poem whatsoever—it just happens to rhyme—but this random word then springs loose a phrase that in turn brings an image to mind, an image that in turn resonates back through the first five lines, triggering a whole new sense and feeling, twisting and driving the poem to a richer meaning and emotion. Thanks to the poet’s Creative Limitation of this rhyme scheme, the poem achieves an intensity it would have lacked had the poet allowed himself the freedom to choose any word he wished.
The principle of Creative Limitation calls for freedom within a circle of obstacles. Talent is like a muscle: without something to push against, it atrophies. So we deliberately put rocks in our path, barriers that inspire. We discipline ourselves as to what to do, while we’re boundless as to how to do it. One of our first steps, therefore, is to identify the genre or combination of genres that govern our work, for the stony ground that grows the most fruitful ideas is genre convention.
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in my short film script A HYPOTHETICAL CAT, i found during my first drafts that the story was naturally falling into a palindrome pattern, so i leaned into it. much like your story about the poets who discover a new world when forced by their own rules to make the sixth line rhyme with the fourth and second.
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Your post reminds me of how I push myself when I outline and write scenes, Ehsan Rahimpour. Sometimes I'll come up with and write plain scenes, then I'll realize I need to add things and make the scenes deeper.