Craft Notes
Constrain me, baby.
People, it seems, want to hear about constraints.
In grad school, I did an independent study with Steve Tomasula on the OuLiPo, short for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or workshop of potential literature. I’d read Calvino and Perec before and had a rough idea about what they were about, but yeah, it was a pretty amazing semester. So here’s the simple version of OuLiPo: The OuLiPo is a group of writers and mathematicians who believe that writing reaches its truest potential when constraints are put on the writer during the process of writing. A few obvious examples: Perec wrote a novel without using the letter e. In French. The OuLiPo came up with all sorts of constraints, whether lipograms, palindromes, N+7, or so on. You can look these up, if you want.
Reading all that OuLiPo stuff was highly influential to my writing. My first two books utilize formal constraints (Parabola mimics a parabola, not particularly clever on my part, and Changing takes on the form of hexagrams in the I Ching or Book of Changes). Whereas my use of constraints isn’t as obvious now as it was when I was in grad school, I still use them, and I agree with the OuLiPians: my writing does reach a truer potential when I use constraints. It makes writing a game. It makes writing a pleasure.
I’ve been in a rut. From 2006 to now, I’ve been writing these fairy tale books using vignette patchwork form. I’ve written something like four books like this, and whereas I love fairy tales, I’m also a little over them. Or at least I don’t want to write another fairy tale book. Last November, I hung out with Jeremy Davies and AD Jameson in Chicago. They both work(ed) at Dalkey, a big OuLiPo-friendly press, and we came up a list of constraints for my new ms, given my rut:
- No indefinite articles preceding characters. Fairy tales utilize archetypal characters (such as the old cat lady, the little girl, the old witch, the handsome prince, etc.). By removing the possibility of indefinite articles before characters, I can’t use the stock characters I’m most comfortable using.
- Call attention to any clichés. (This is stolen from Gilbert Sorrentino.)
- Chapter length. I gave myself an arbitrary word-count for each chapter. It’s something like 8000 words. I should’ve written it down, but I forgot.
- No magic.
I’m happy to say I’m roughly 115 pages into the ms now, following my constraints, and it’s been great.
The best thing about constraints is that they don’t have to be crazy or over the top. To write a novel without the letter E is amazing, yes, but not every novel has to be that way. Constraints can be subtle. If anything, to me, some of the “ideas” for constraints are better than the novels they create. For instance, Doug Nufer (not a member of the OuLiPo, though a noted constraint user) has a novel called Never Again, where he doesn’t repeat any words: brilliant idea but impossible to read. There’s also a palindromic novel. I don’t remember who wrote it. Great idea, not a real pleasure to read, except for the “cool” factor.
A few summers ago, I went to this FC2 summer thing, and Susan Steinberg led a workshop where she bashed commercial realism as being “easy to write,” books by the likes of Nicholas Sparks. I have a soft spot for Sparks (he endowed Notre Dame’s creative writing program), but of course, his writing is appalling. That being said, I made the argument that Sparks or Stephen King or the Twilight chick, they all use constraints too. To write formulaicly is to write by constraint. Sure, the result doesn’t push literature forward (if anything, it keeps it back), but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t use constraint, nor that it isn’t, in it’s own very special way, difficult. I couldn’t write a romance novel like Sparks. I don’t have it in me. Even if I did what he did. And here’s a little back story, Nicky got a degree from Notre Dame in Business, and homeboy is smart: he read a bunch of romance novels, set himself a formula, and wrote a bunch of books using that formula. This is not unlike what Stephen King does. And I know this will probably make people pissed, but formula fiction is totally constraint-based, though not at all OuLiPo (there’s that potential as goal that prevents).
And let’s be fair about this whole thing, yes, the OuLiPo came up with the whole “constraint as potential” thing, but constraints have been around for eons. Just look at poetry. Poetry is all about constraint.
So, do you write by constraint? If so, what? Do you think your writing reaches truer potential through the constraint?
Tags: constraints, Nicholas Sparks, oulipo
i’ve written quite a few things under various constraints. here are a couple of PDFs of them –
http://www.scribd.com/doc/28067009/Adam-David-El-Bimbo-Variations
http://www.scribd.com/doc/28066452/Adam-David-Texticles
– the first one being a riff on queneau’s EXERCISES, as a sort of exercise a la mathews, to see if the oulipian formal games can be applied in my language (filipino) and literary tradition. i self-published it and it won an award last year as best first book of 2007-2008, so that was great. more than half of the contents is in filipino, but it’s more or less readable.
about poetry being all about constraints, that’s true, which is why oulipo had/has a bit of genius in its processes, achieving elucidation that borders on duh-ness by way of good old defamiliarisation – we know this about poetry, but why is oulipo so fresh? another thing i like about oulipo is how it was partially motivated by queneau’s distancing from breton and the surrealists, very much like bataille’s DOCUMENTS: a productive exercise of spite. we need more of those things.
anyway, great post, great blog. looking forward to reading that ms in whatever form. good luck!
almost forgot: there’s also this –
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=7DHJCZDT
– an incomplete novel i call ABECEDIARYA. it’s basically a story cycle of orgies, written as univocalics. mainly influenced by abish’s ALPHABETICAL AFRICA and bok’s EUNOIA (although i only found out about EUNOIA when i was already midway into this part of the ms). all in english!
YES CONSTRAINT IS NECESSARY WITHOUT CONSTRAINT THERE IS NO NOVEL EVEN TRISTRAM SHANDY WRITTEN WITH CONSTRAINT PERHAPS THE ENTIRE WRITING PROCESS IS LEARNING EFFECTIVE CONSTRAINT FOR A PARTICULAR STORY.
IMO, Aaron Kunin is doing some of the most unique constraint-based work on the contemporary “scene.” Totally different from the kind of thing at which Christian Bok excels… almost as if each of Kunin’s books is an investigation into the psychology of being prevented / thwarted. That a book like THE SORE THROAT escapes mere literary (sado-)masochism is just one of its amazements.
i do things that are like 40 words or whatever but not b/c of constraint. well, now that i think of it i think i drifted into v short stuff to get away from the constraint, and boredom, i feel in doing longer fiction. it’s fun though to set up constraints with other people, which is kind of what collaboration is–being necessarily constrained by having to accept their contribution.
Doug Nufer has done some very good work. And Harry Mathews, whom I’m fortunate enough to know, is the American master. Is he aware of your material? I’ve given myself constraints, such as in “Kansas” (recently in Gigantic) or “Subito, Subito” (Pindeldyboz). But I tend most often to act as the chronicler of my dreams.
This is most interesting.
I will do things like write using only one syllable words or write in paragraphs of no more than 75 or 100 words. It’s fun and can bring about really interesting work.
I love Harry Mathews. I probably can’t emphasize that word “love” enough. Is he aware of my material? I doubt it. In fact, I’d be shocked if he did. But if you know him…
I spoke at a conference early this year in which I was part of a panel on constraint writing. Before we spoke, I learned that the other two panelists were co-presenting this thing about how constraint can free creativity, so I cut the Oulipian constraint-as-freedom-from-ideologically-received-language-and-forms stuff and focused on some more technical specifics of my own writing with and research on constraint. Then the other panelists spoke about how genre fiction is constraint-based and didn’t once mention Oulipo or any of the traditional constraint-writing exercises I was expecting. So yeah, as Lily says, constraint is also totally mainstream. Oulipians themselves are, of course, completely aware of this. If you read their early documents (Le Lionnais wrote a few founding manifestos to this effect, for example), you see that the point is not that constraint is new, but that new constraints are new. The other major thing to keep in mind is that the foundation of Oulipo comes in part out of Raymond Queneau’s dissatisfaction with the Surrealists and their inability to see that practices like ‘automatic writing’ were not at all free, but in fact the purest expressions of received language.
If anyone is interested, I wrote a lot about the Oulipo and the ideas of potentiality and constraint for my MA thesis, and I’d be happy to send some relevant excerpts.
So anyways, as is probably evident from the above, I’m more or less obsessed with constraint writing. My book (78 Stories) is based on a constraint that makes fills every white space in a crossword puzzle with a paragraph– thus producing intersecting stories instead of intersecting answers. I’ve since continued with some projects using both overlaid and multi-directional writing constraints. Then also http://www.potentialbooksbook.com is my current project, to which many of you are contributing and to which others of you should think about submitting.
I love EUNOIA. I read an interview with Bok a few years ago, in which he was talking about all the constraints he used in EUNOIA, not just the univocalics. It was all very specific and very impressive.
That guy rules.
This is awesome–thanks, Lily. I have a very tidy mind when I write (which is kind of odd, considering how disastrously unorganized I can be) and I think I’ve often written with constraints without knowing that’s what I was doing, setting myself little challenges like every sentence has to be declarative, or there has to be map hidden in the piece, that kind of thing. I’m definitely the opposite of an auto-writer.
I’m excited to experiment with this further. I just ordered the Mathews compendium and a bunch of Oulipian stuff (Perec, Queneau, Bok) and am pumped to take a trip down this path.
I don’t tend to write with constraint, but perhaps I should run all of my sentences through the N+ generator to which you linked. I just did that with a sentence I’m planning to use in a poem somewhere.
Original sentence: “We didn’t follow, and when we finally did, we found only a torso, and inside honey, and inside bees.”
N+6 sentence: “We didn’t follow, and when we finally did, we found only a torturer, and inside honour, and inside beers.”
i write almost exclusively with restraint, more to maintain my own interest in what i’m writing than anything else (if i don’t know when the ending is coming when i’m writing i have a tendency to never finish whatever it is– does that make sense? like, if i don’t know at what point i’ll be at the end i can’t ever get to the end, or something).
pretty generally i have a “no pronouns or proper nouns” constraint, but after writing 4 or 5 stories with variations on that rule i decided to reverse it, force myself to use pronouns and proper nouns.
but as much as constraint, i’ve found myself drawn more towards generative methods, both in things being enjoyable to read (specifically robbe-grillet) and in my own writing. oulipo is super-duper rad though.
Like this, but I’m not sure Stephen King is actually that formulaic, unless genre is identical to formula, in which case, well, he still doesn’t just write in any one genre.
As for me I’ve spent most of my time at the MFA sort of loosening up after a couple years of writing by gratuitously tight rules. The rules were good in that they got me to a new level of writing very quickly, but eventually they started to strangle a little and I had to allow more elements into my stories. My wife has talked about a similar experience.
i’ve written quite a few things under various constraints. here are a couple of PDFs of them –
http://www.scribd.com/doc/28067009/Adam-David-El-Bimbo-Variations
http://www.scribd.com/doc/28066452/Adam-David-Texticles
– the first one being a riff on queneau’s EXERCISES, as a sort of exercise a la mathews, to see if the oulipian formal games can be applied in my language (filipino) and literary tradition. i self-published it and it won an award last year as best first book of 2007-2008, so that was great. more than half of the contents is in filipino, but it’s more or less readable.
about poetry being all about constraints, that’s true, which is why oulipo had/has a bit of genius in its processes, achieving elucidation that borders on duh-ness by way of good old defamiliarisation – we know this about poetry, but why is oulipo so fresh? another thing i like about oulipo is how it was partially motivated by queneau’s distancing from breton and the surrealists, very much like bataille’s DOCUMENTS: a productive exercise of spite. we need more of those things.
anyway, great post, great blog. looking forward to reading that ms in whatever form. good luck!
almost forgot: there’s also this –
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=7DHJCZDT
– an incomplete novel i call ABECEDIARYA. it’s basically a story cycle of orgies, written as univocalics. mainly influenced by abish’s ALPHABETICAL AFRICA and bok’s EUNOIA (although i only found out about EUNOIA when i was already midway into this part of the ms). all in english!
YES CONSTRAINT IS NECESSARY WITHOUT CONSTRAINT THERE IS NO NOVEL EVEN TRISTRAM SHANDY WRITTEN WITH CONSTRAINT PERHAPS THE ENTIRE WRITING PROCESS IS LEARNING EFFECTIVE CONSTRAINT FOR A PARTICULAR STORY.
IMO, Aaron Kunin is doing some of the most unique constraint-based work on the contemporary “scene.” Totally different from the kind of thing at which Christian Bok excels… almost as if each of Kunin’s books is an investigation into the psychology of being prevented / thwarted. That a book like THE SORE THROAT escapes mere literary (sado-)masochism is just one of its amazements.
I just put a few lines of a John Ratti poem into the N+ link and here’s N+4:
It was noon and there was lightning; lightning from the tall windshields; lightning from the frosted glen panniers of the darling oath doormats; lightning from the glen blouse glosses. Lightning felony across the floppy and the tangerine linoleum looked speaker upon despite the squat brave cuspidors mouthing in the cornflowers.
Amazing.
Reading that out loud was like dancing the tango.
i do things that are like 40 words or whatever but not b/c of constraint. well, now that i think of it i think i drifted into v short stuff to get away from the constraint, and boredom, i feel in doing longer fiction. it’s fun though to set up constraints with other people, which is kind of what collaboration is–being necessarily constrained by having to accept their contribution.
Doug Nufer has done some very good work. And Harry Mathews, whom I’m fortunate enough to know, is the American master. Is he aware of your material? I’ve given myself constraints, such as in “Kansas” (recently in Gigantic) or “Subito, Subito” (Pindeldyboz). But I tend most often to act as the chronicler of my dreams.
This is most interesting.
I will do things like write using only one syllable words or write in paragraphs of no more than 75 or 100 words. It’s fun and can bring about really interesting work.
YES AGREED
I love Harry Mathews. I probably can’t emphasize that word “love” enough. Is he aware of my material? I doubt it. In fact, I’d be shocked if he did. But if you know him…
I spoke at a conference early this year in which I was part of a panel on constraint writing. Before we spoke, I learned that the other two panelists were co-presenting this thing about how constraint can free creativity, so I cut the Oulipian constraint-as-freedom-from-ideologically-received-language-and-forms stuff and focused on some more technical specifics of my own writing with and research on constraint. Then the other panelists spoke about how genre fiction is constraint-based and didn’t once mention Oulipo or any of the traditional constraint-writing exercises I was expecting. So yeah, as Lily says, constraint is also totally mainstream. Oulipians themselves are, of course, completely aware of this. If you read their early documents (Le Lionnais wrote a few founding manifestos to this effect, for example), you see that the point is not that constraint is new, but that new constraints are new. The other major thing to keep in mind is that the foundation of Oulipo comes in part out of Raymond Queneau’s dissatisfaction with the Surrealists and their inability to see that practices like ‘automatic writing’ were not at all free, but in fact the purest expressions of received language.
If anyone is interested, I wrote a lot about the Oulipo and the ideas of potentiality and constraint for my MA thesis, and I’d be happy to send some relevant excerpts.
So anyways, as is probably evident from the above, I’m more or less obsessed with constraint writing. My book (78 Stories) is based on a constraint that makes fills every white space in a crossword puzzle with a paragraph– thus producing intersecting stories instead of intersecting answers. I’ve since continued with some projects using both overlaid and multi-directional writing constraints. Then also http://www.potentialbooksbook.com is my current project, to which many of you are contributing and to which others of you should think about submitting.
Fascinating thread. Constraints are essential, and as you suggest, they’re everywhere.
Lately I’ve been working with some actors and performers who provide prompts for reading work aloud in a rehearsal setting. I find it very challenging, but it helps me think about what’s essential to the piece, what I want the audience to feel, to take away, and how I want to go about expressing those things.
I love EUNOIA. I read an interview with Bok a few years ago, in which he was talking about all the constraints he used in EUNOIA, not just the univocalics. It was all very specific and very impressive.
That guy rules.
This is awesome–thanks, Lily. I have a very tidy mind when I write (which is kind of odd, considering how disastrously unorganized I can be) and I think I’ve often written with constraints without knowing that’s what I was doing, setting myself little challenges like every sentence has to be declarative, or there has to be map hidden in the piece, that kind of thing. I’m definitely the opposite of an auto-writer.
I’m excited to experiment with this further. I just ordered the Mathews compendium and a bunch of Oulipian stuff (Perec, Queneau, Bok) and am pumped to take a trip down this path.
I don’t tend to write with constraint, but perhaps I should run all of my sentences through the N+ generator to which you linked. I just did that with a sentence I’m planning to use in a poem somewhere.
Original sentence: “We didn’t follow, and when we finally did, we found only a torso, and inside honey, and inside bees.”
N+6 sentence: “We didn’t follow, and when we finally did, we found only a torturer, and inside honour, and inside beers.”
i write almost exclusively with restraint, more to maintain my own interest in what i’m writing than anything else (if i don’t know when the ending is coming when i’m writing i have a tendency to never finish whatever it is– does that make sense? like, if i don’t know at what point i’ll be at the end i can’t ever get to the end, or something).
pretty generally i have a “no pronouns or proper nouns” constraint, but after writing 4 or 5 stories with variations on that rule i decided to reverse it, force myself to use pronouns and proper nouns.
but as much as constraint, i’ve found myself drawn more towards generative methods, both in things being enjoyable to read (specifically robbe-grillet) and in my own writing. oulipo is super-duper rad though.
Like this, but I’m not sure Stephen King is actually that formulaic, unless genre is identical to formula, in which case, well, he still doesn’t just write in any one genre.
As for me I’ve spent most of my time at the MFA sort of loosening up after a couple years of writing by gratuitously tight rules. The rules were good in that they got me to a new level of writing very quickly, but eventually they started to strangle a little and I had to allow more elements into my stories. My wife has talked about a similar experience.
I just put a few lines of a John Ratti poem into the N+ link and here’s N+4:
It was noon and there was lightning; lightning from the tall windshields; lightning from the frosted glen panniers of the darling oath doormats; lightning from the glen blouse glosses. Lightning felony across the floppy and the tangerine linoleum looked speaker upon despite the squat brave cuspidors mouthing in the cornflowers.
Amazing.
Reading that out loud was like dancing the tango.
YES AGREED
Fascinating thread. Constraints are essential, and as you suggest, they’re everywhere.
Lately I’ve been working with some actors and performers who provide prompts for reading work aloud in a rehearsal setting. I find it very challenging, but it helps me think about what’s essential to the piece, what I want the audience to feel, to take away, and how I want to go about expressing those things.
Sorry if this is obvious, but anyone interested in Oulipo or constraints should check out Raymond Roussel, the guy who’s pretty much responsible for Surrealism *and* Oulipo. His book How I Wrote Certain of My Books is pretty great at telling you how he wrote certain of his books…
All but forgotten, but so, so awesome…
Thanks, Pemulis, for mentioning Roussel. I (foolishly) too often leave him off lists of “constraint writers” I admire. Impressions of Africa and Locus Solus are both fascinating and curious books.
Amber—If you still have any room left on your credit card, get some Roussel (a genuine eccentric).
Emmett Williams and Jackson MacLow are also worth looks. One or both were connected with Fluxus, if I remember correctly.
he also spent his childhood kicking it with his neighbor Proust.
O this makes me so excited!
Added him to the list just now. Thanks!
Sometimes I find that if I’m aware of the constraint in question it gets too distracting or makes me feel too OCD, which is why I didn’t finish Nufer’s “Negativeland.”
My favorite Harry Mathews, and among my very favorite novels ever, is one where the specific constraint is a mystery: “Cigarettes.” Though at the same time I’d love to know.
mr segal, i’m very interested in reading bits from your thesis. a few of us here in manila are trying to recontextualise largely first world concepts of formal play into our own writing tradition: our english-language tradition is 100 years strong, sadly the majority is still stuck either in the romantics or in the beats, although in the last ten years, highly theoretical/experimental/formally-playful works have been getting great mileage, so things are starting to happen, and maybe we can find a few valuable things from your own critical and creative writing.
i’ve also done a few things like your potential books project, only in filipino, and mainly influenced by richard brautigan’s THE ABORTION. i based the constraints on a deck of cards i bought off the store, designed to help facilitate storytelling mainly for young adults whore mainly into genre stuff – sf, fantasy, horror – so my output leaned towards that tradition. maybe i can translate a few and send them to you?
also, i’d love to read 78 STORIES, too. is that available anywhere online, maybe excerpts? being in third world asia, a lot of things (like the post) are unreliable here, so i don’t think i’ll be able to order your book any time soon, haha.
Sorry if this is obvious, but anyone interested in Oulipo or constraints should check out Raymond Roussel, the guy who’s pretty much responsible for Surrealism *and* Oulipo. His book How I Wrote Certain of My Books is pretty great at telling you how he wrote certain of his books…
All but forgotten, but so, so awesome…
Thanks, Pemulis, for mentioning Roussel. I (foolishly) too often leave him off lists of “constraint writers” I admire. Impressions of Africa and Locus Solus are both fascinating and curious books.
Amber—If you still have any room left on your credit card, get some Roussel (a genuine eccentric).
Emmett Williams and Jackson MacLow are also worth looks. One or both were connected with Fluxus, if I remember correctly.
he also spent his childhood kicking it with his neighbor Proust.
O this makes me so excited!
Added him to the list just now. Thanks!
Sometimes I find that if I’m aware of the constraint in question it gets too distracting or makes me feel too OCD, which is why I didn’t finish Nufer’s “Negativeland.”
My favorite Harry Mathews, and among my very favorite novels ever, is one where the specific constraint is a mystery: “Cigarettes.” Though at the same time I’d love to know.
mr segal, i’m very interested in reading bits from your thesis. a few of us here in manila are trying to recontextualise largely first world concepts of formal play into our own writing tradition: our english-language tradition is 100 years strong, sadly the majority is still stuck either in the romantics or in the beats, although in the last ten years, highly theoretical/experimental/formally-playful works have been getting great mileage, so things are starting to happen, and maybe we can find a few valuable things from your own critical and creative writing.
i’ve also done a few things like your potential books project, only in filipino, and mainly influenced by richard brautigan’s THE ABORTION. i based the constraints on a deck of cards i bought off the store, designed to help facilitate storytelling mainly for young adults whore mainly into genre stuff – sf, fantasy, horror – so my output leaned towards that tradition. maybe i can translate a few and send them to you?
also, i’d love to read 78 STORIES, too. is that available anywhere online, maybe excerpts? being in third world asia, a lot of things (like the post) are unreliable here, so i don’t think i’ll be able to order your book any time soon, haha.
This is great, Lily. I was wondering when you were gonna school us more on OuLiPo.
Outside of poetry, which I studied long before I seriously read or wrote fiction, I learned about creative restraints by listening to and interviewing world-class improviser-composers like Rova Saxophone Quartet. Here’s a taste, if you like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1d3aB_NST8&feature=related What Rova and a lot of the other contemporary ‘avant-garde jazz’ musicians do is use frameworks for in-the-moment compositions, like graphic scores or other forms that restrict open-ended choices while still affording lots of interpretive freedom to both the ensemble and the individual players. The structure imposed on the pieces frees up the players to LISTEN and respond accordingly.
I tried to apply this kind of model to writing my badbadbad novel (forthcoming soon, please…) by setting macro and micro structures in advance — for the narrative arc or various settings/scenes — and then I would go there and let the specific guidelines of the various chapters or movements take me where the story needed to go next. I also tried to use for pacing certain beats or shifts in mood that I lifted from a film… though I can’t recall the name now. I do remember liking the way the movie dealt with heavy subject matter in a non-oppressive way, shifting back and forth from jokes or lighter-seeming moments to more intense scenes while still building tension and character, etc. throughout. Anyway, those restraints helped me shape 3xbad — compelling me to improvise w/in the frameworks, freeing me up in a way that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. I wrote the first draft in 13 weeks — astonishing, for me, given my poetry background and how sloooooowly I tend to write — so I’d say the restraints made all the difference.
This is great, Lily. I was wondering when you were gonna school us more on OuLiPo.
Outside of poetry, which I studied long before I seriously read or wrote fiction, I learned about creative restraints by listening to and interviewing world-class improviser-composers like Rova Saxophone Quartet. Here’s a taste, if you like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1d3aB_NST8&feature=related What Rova and a lot of the other contemporary ‘avant-garde jazz’ musicians do is use frameworks for in-the-moment compositions, like graphic scores or other forms that restrict open-ended choices while still affording lots of interpretive freedom to both the ensemble and the individual players. The structure imposed on the pieces frees up the players to LISTEN and respond accordingly.
I tried to apply this kind of model to writing my badbadbad novel (forthcoming soon, please…) by setting macro and micro structures in advance — for the narrative arc or various settings/scenes — and then I would go there and let the specific guidelines of the various chapters or movements take me where the story needed to go next. I also tried to use for pacing certain beats or shifts in mood that I lifted from a film… though I can’t recall the name now. I do remember liking the way the movie dealt with heavy subject matter in a non-oppressive way, shifting back and forth from jokes or lighter-seeming moments to more intense scenes while still building tension and character, etc. throughout. Anyway, those restraints helped me shape 3xbad — compelling me to improvise w/in the frameworks, freeing me up in a way that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. I wrote the first draft in 13 weeks — astonishing, for me, given my poetry background and how sloooooowly I tend to write — so I’d say the restraints made all the difference.
I’ve been reading the Review of Contemporary Fiction issue on Perec from last year, and it is chock full of intriguing stuff…one thing Perec says in an interview that stood out was that he sort of resisted repeating himself, so that the constraints would be ever-shifting–I suppose one way to view this is as a kind of a meta-constraint. He also wanted to try his hand at writing in every conceivable genre…the more I learn about Perec the more I want to take him on as a role model, albeit an evasive, shape-shifting one. In my own work, constraints abound but generally in the way that Amber described above, often a sentence-by-sentence thing. It varies from piece to piece, though. One of my stories is designed to shift in the manner in which the dome of a planetarium rotates–a sudden dislocation of the reader, a reorientation to which the adjustment is pleasurable spectacle, one hopes. But of course the story can be read without any inkling that that’s going on. External restraints can be helpful as well. To write on an empty stomach is no casual decision, and I think it usually ups the caliber of the prose.
Adam-
What’s your email? Let me know and I’ll send you things.
I like this a lot, Tim: “a sudden dislocation of the reader, a reorientation to which the adjustment is pleasurable spectacle.”
I’ve noticed definite shifts in the velocity or momentum of my prose on or off food. I tend to go until I can’t, then I eat and chill or do other work and revise (or revisit) later in the evening when my head’s in a different space.
This, in my inbox, from none other than the venerable Harry Mathews, who schools me right on the OuLiPo (Thank you to I. for all you’ve done!): Oulipians do not “believe that writing reaches its truest potential when constraints are put on the writer during the process of writing.” We are emphatically not prescriptive, and all of us often write texts that involve no Oulipian constraints. (I tell people that I’m a writer and an Oulipian but not an Oulipian writer except occasionally.) She’s [me, Lily] perfectly right, however, to say that all writing is subject to constraints — Oulipian ones are ways to counter those imposed by usage — and that artificial constraints predate the Oulipo by many centuries.
I can’t believe you got an email from Harry Mathews…tell him to send me one, okay? I’ve got a book for him.
I’ve been reading the Review of Contemporary Fiction issue on Perec from last year, and it is chock full of intriguing stuff…one thing Perec says in an interview that stood out was that he sort of resisted repeating himself, so that the constraints would be ever-shifting–I suppose one way to view this is as a kind of a meta-constraint. He also wanted to try his hand at writing in every conceivable genre…the more I learn about Perec the more I want to take him on as a role model, albeit an evasive, shape-shifting one. In my own work, constraints abound but generally in the way that Amber described above, often a sentence-by-sentence thing. It varies from piece to piece, though. One of my stories is designed to shift in the manner in which the dome of a planetarium rotates–a sudden dislocation of the reader, a reorientation to which the adjustment is pleasurable spectacle, one hopes. But of course the story can be read without any inkling that that’s going on. External restraints can be helpful as well. To write on an empty stomach is no casual decision, and I think it usually ups the caliber of the prose.
Adam-
What’s your email? Let me know and I’ll send you things.
I like this a lot, Tim: “a sudden dislocation of the reader, a reorientation to which the adjustment is pleasurable spectacle.”
I’ve noticed definite shifts in the velocity or momentum of my prose on or off food. I tend to go until I can’t, then I eat and chill or do other work and revise (or revisit) later in the evening when my head’s in a different space.
This, in my inbox, from none other than the venerable Harry Mathews, who schools me right on the OuLiPo (Thank you to I. for all you’ve done!): Oulipians do not “believe that writing reaches its truest potential when constraints are put on the writer during the process of writing.” We are emphatically not prescriptive, and all of us often write texts that involve no Oulipian constraints. (I tell people that I’m a writer and an Oulipian but not an Oulipian writer except occasionally.) She’s [me, Lily] perfectly right, however, to say that all writing is subject to constraints — Oulipian ones are ways to counter those imposed by usage — and that artificial constraints predate the Oulipo by many centuries.
I can’t believe you got an email from Harry Mathews…tell him to send me one, okay? I’ve got a book for him.
That is cool.
Ben-
Hey, thanks! eMail address is juncruznaligas(at)gmail(dot)com!
That is cool.
Ben-
Hey, thanks! eMail address is juncruznaligas(at)gmail(dot)com!
[…] “Constrain Me, Baby,” Lily Hoang, HTMLGiant, 21 June 2010 […]