Constrained Writing

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.

Description

Constraints on writing are common and can serve a variety of purposes. For example, a text may place restrictions on its vocabulary, e.g. Basic English, copula-free text, defining vocabulary for dictionaries, and other limited vocabularies for teaching English as a second language or to children.

In poetry, formal constraints abound in both mainstream and experimental work. Familiar elements of poetry like rhyme and meter are often applied as constraints. Well-established verse forms like the sonnet, sestina, villanelle, limerick, and haiku are variously constrained by meter, rhyme, repetition, length, and other characteristics.

Outside of established traditions, particularly in the avant-garde, writers have produced a variety of work under more severe constraints; this is often what the term "constrained writing" is specifically applied to. For example:

* Reverse-lipograms: each word must contain a particular letter.
* Univocalic poetry, using only one vowel.
* Mandated vocabulary, where the writer must include specific words (for example, Quadrivial Quandary solicits individual sentences containing all four words in a daily selection).
* Bilingual homophonous poetry, where the poem makes sense in two different languages at the same time, constituting two simultaneous homophonous poems.
* Alliteratives or tautograms, in which every word must start with the same letter (or subset of letters; see '' Alphabetical Africa'').
* Lipogram: a letter (commonly e or o) is outlawed.
* Acrostics: first letter of each word/sentence/paragraph forms a word or sentence.
* Abecedarius: first letter of each word/verse/section goes through the alphabet.
* Palindromes, such as the word "radar", read the same forwards and backwards.
* Anglish, favouring Anglo-Saxon words over Greek and Roman/Latin words.
* Pilish, where the lengths of consecutive words match the digits of the number π.
* Anagrams, words or sentences formed by rearranging the letters of another.
* Limitations in punctuation, such as Peter Carey's book '' True History of the Kelly Gang'', which features no commas.
* One syllable article, a form unique to Chinese literature, using many characters all of which are homophones; the result looks sensible as writing but is very confusing when read aloud.
* Chaterism, where the length of words in a phrase or sentence increases or decreases in a uniform, mathematical way.
* Aleatory, where the reader supplies a random input.
* Erasure, which involves erasing words from an existing text and framing the result on the page as a poem.

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

There are a number of constrained writing forms that are restricted by length, including:
* Six-Word Memoirs: 6 words
* Haiku: ~ 3 lines (5–7–5 syllables or 2–3–2 beats recommended.)
* Minisaga: 50 words, +15 for title
* Drabble: 100 words
* Twiction: espoused as a specifically constrained form of microfiction where a story or poem is exactly 140 characters long.
* Sijo: three lines average 14–16 syllables, for a total of 44–46: theme (3, 4,4,4); elaboration (3,4,4,4); counter-theme (3,5) and completion (4,3).

Examples

* Ernest Vincent Wright's '' Gadsby'' (1939) is an English-language novel consisting of 50,000 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. Perec subsequently joked that he incorporated the "e"s not used into ''La Disparition'' in the novella ' (1972), which uses no vowels other than "e". ''Les Revenentes'' was translated into English by Ian Monk as ''The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex''.
* Perec also wrote '' Life A User's Manual'' using the Knight's Tour method of construction. The book is set in a fictional Parisian block of flats, where Perec devises the elevation of the building as a 10×10 grid: 10 storeys, including basements and attics and 10 rooms across, including 2 for the stairwell. Each room is assigned to a chapter, and the order of the chapters is given by the knight's moves on the grid.
* Several of the Psalms are abecedarian in the Hebrew alphabet
* The 2004 French novel ''Le Train de Nulle Part'' (''The Train from Nowhere'') by Michel Thaler was written entirely without verbs.
A New Novel, No Verbs, in France, No Less
' by Scott McLemee, The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 2, 2004.
* ''let me tell you'' (2008), a novel by the Welsh writer Paul Griffiths, uses only the words allotted to Ophelia in ''Hamlet''.
* Experimental Canadian poet Christian Bök's ''Eunoia'' is a univocalic that uses only one vowel in each of its five chapters.
* One famous piece of 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 story by Mike Keith using the first 3835 digits of pi to determine the length of words. ''Not A Wake'' is a book using the same constraint based on the first 10,000 digits.
* ''Never Again'' is a novel by Doug Nufer in which no word is used more than once.
* ''Ella Minnow Pea'' is a book by Mark Dunn where certain letters become unusable throughout the novel.
* '' Alphabetical Africa'' is a book by Walter Abish in which the first chapter only uses words that begin with the letter "a", while the second chapter incorporates the letter "b", and then "c", etc. Once the alphabet is finished, Abish takes letters away, one at a time, until the last chapter, leaving only words that begin with the letter "a".
* Mary Godolphin wrote versions of ''Robinson Crusoe'', ''Aesop's Fables'', ''The Swiss Family Robinson'', and other books using only monosyllabic words.
* Theodor Geisel

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