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.
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, which uses no vowels other than “e.”
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Examples
- Lipogram: a letter (commonly e or o) is outlawed.
- Palindromes, such as the word “radar,” read the same forwards and backwards.
- Alliteratives, in which every word must start with the same letter (or subset of letters; see Alphabetical Africa).
- Anagrams
- Aleatory (where the reader supplies a random input).
- Univocalic poetry
- Examples of constrained writing
Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Constrained writing" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on original research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.
