Use Constraint to Remove the Obvious

Georges Perec’s La Disparition (1969), a novel of more than three hundred pages, contains no letter e. Perec belonged to Oulipo, the Workshop of Potential Literature that Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais founded in 1960 to explore writing under structural constraints; he had joined in 1967. The plot concerns people who vanish one after another, and the missing letter is the clue to the mystery. Gilbert Adair’s English translation, A Void (1994), also avoids the letter, which in English meant doing without the article “the.” Everything that has to be said, including the characters’ names and every transition, must go round the gap.

Perec’s rule is the extreme case of what any constraint does. Faced with all possible words, a writer tends to reach for the first word, the first image, the first sentence shape, and those tend to be choices made before. A constraint makes some of them unavailable, so the writer has to go looking, and the search often turns up what the habitual route would never have produced. The Practice below tests that reasoning on your own page.

William Wordsworth opened the sonnets in his 1807 Poems, in Two Volumes with a defense of the form, and the defense is itself a sonnet. Nuns, hermits, students, weavers, and bees, he says, are content in their enclosures: “In truth, the prison, unto which we doom / Ourselves, no prison is.” He confesses that it was a pastime “to be bound / Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground,” in the hope of giving some solace to readers who “have felt the weight of too much liberty.” A chosen form carries decisions made before you begin, and those decisions free attention for what is yours to decide.

External constraints work by the same logic: a word count, a deadline, a commissioning brief, a fixed room and cast. Oulipo fixes its rules before writing, but a constraint can also be sprung mid-draft, forbidding adjectives for one page to see what the sentences do without them, and you may use one to get unstuck and then drop it.

Constraints fail when they lend the piece a novelty the material does not need, and a severe rule can turn the Work into a puzzle and put feeling out of reach. Perec’s rule fit its book, since the absence it imposed was the story. Aim a constraint at a habit the Work actually has, and drop it if what it forces is merely odd.

Practice. Take a passage of your own, about 150 words, in any genre, and name one habit you notice in it: reliance on adjectives, sentences that all begin with the subject, the verb “to be,” a certain kind of ending. Write a rule that forbids exactly that, severe enough that at least a third of your first instincts become impossible, and rewrite the passage under it in thirty minutes. Underline three choices you would never have made unprompted. Then lift the rule, return to the original passage, and carry at least one of the three back into it, leaving the rule behind.