Constrained writing

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Constrained writing is a literary technique in which the writer is bound by some condition that forbids certain things or imposes a pattern.

Constraints are very common in poetry, which often requires the writer to use a particular verse form.

The most common constrained forms of writing are strict restrictions in vocabulary, e.g. Basic English, E-Prime, defining vocabulary for dictionaries, and other limited vocabularies for teaching English as a Second Language or to children. This is not generally what is meant by “constrained writing” in the literary sense, which is motivated by more aesthetic concerns. For example:

• Lipogram, a letter (commonly e or o) is outlawed;
• Palindromes, such as the word “radar,” read the same both ways;
• Alliteratives, in which every word must start with the same letter (or subset of letters; see Alphabetical Africa)
• Acrostics;
• Reverse-lipograms (each word must contain a particular letter);
• Anglish;
• Anagrams;
• Aleatory (where the reader supplies a random input);

The Oulipo group is a gathering of writers who use such techniques. The Outrapo group use theatrical constraints.

Gadsby is an English-language novel consisting of 50,100 words, none of which contain the letter “e.”

In 1969, French writer Georges Perec published La Disparition, a novel that did not include the letter “e.” It was translated into English in 1995 by Gilbert Adair as “A Void.” Perec subsequently joked that he incorporated the "e"s not used in La Disparition in the novella Les Revenentes (1972), which uses no vowels other than "e". Les Revenentes was translated into English by Ian Monk as The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex.

In 2004, a new marvel from France: a novel, entirely without verbs: Le Train de Nulle Part (“The Train from Nowhere”) by Michel Thaler. [1]

Experimental Canadian poet Christian Bök's Eunoia is a lipogram that uses only one vowel in each of its five chapters

One famous constrained writing in the Chinese language is the Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den which consists of 92 characters, all with the sound shi. Another is the Thousand Character Classic in which all 1000 characters are unique without any repetition.

Cadaeic Cadenza is a short book by Mike Keith using the digits of pi as the length of words.

[edit] External links

• Mike Keith’s World of Words & Numbers, a site with many pieces of constrained writing
• Eunoia by Christian Bök, a most contstrained work of literature. Each chapter is a lipogram containing only one vowel, and each chapter also must allude to the art of writing, describe a culinary banquet, a prurient debauch, a pastoral tableau, and a nautical voyage. The text must exhaust 98% of the lexicon for each vowel and minimize repetition.
• Poe, E.: Near a Raven, a retelling of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven in which the lengths of words are the values of the digits in pi
• uncyclopedia:Alliteration, an amazingly alliterated article, all adjectives and adverbs advancing 'A' again.
• Mike Schertzer, in Cipher and Poverty (The Book of Nothing), created a three-level acronymic poem. Beginning with a name a verse was created for which the name was the acronym. This verse was then expanded, and then again. The final verse is 224 words long (which means the previous verse, its corresponding acronym, contains 224 letters).
• www.constrained.org, a recently-restored plethora of constrained-writing techniques and works.