A little freedom

"Would 'Clockers' even be published right now?" [Richard] Price wondered out loud. He told me he set the new novel in 2008 because it was a period in New York, and in the world, that he better understood: "There was less policing of language. There was less of a sense that you can't write about this. You have no right to write about this." He wanted to write about a time in which his impressions of Harlem were just forming. "It gave me a little freedom."

Richard Price's Street Life by Kevin Lozano, The New Yorker

(What does your instructions say about your purpose?)