Constrained writing
Based on Wikipedia: Constrained writing
The Strange Freedom of Literary Handcuffs
In 1939, a man named Ernest Vincent Wright sat down and wrote a fifty-thousand-word novel without once using the letter "e"—the most common letter in the English language. He reportedly tied down the "e" key on his typewriter to prevent himself from accidentally typing it. The resulting book, Gadsby, reads surprisingly smoothly, though you might notice something feels slightly off without quite being able to pinpoint why.
This is constrained writing. And it might be the most counterintuitive creative technique ever devised.
The basic idea is deceptively simple: impose a rule that forbids certain things or demands a specific pattern, then write something meaningful within those boundaries. It sounds like a recipe for disaster. Why would anyone voluntarily handicap themselves? Yet some of the most inventive, surprising, and genuinely beautiful writing has emerged from authors who chose to work with one hand tied behind their back.
Constraints You Already Know
Before we venture into the stranger corners of this practice, it's worth recognizing that you've encountered constrained writing your entire life. Poetry is, in essence, a form of constrained writing that we've simply normalized.
Consider the sonnet. Fourteen lines. A specific rhyme scheme. Ten syllables per line, alternating between unstressed and stressed. Shakespeare wrote 154 of them, each one following the same rigid formula, yet producing poems that feel entirely different from one another. The constraint didn't limit his expression—it gave it a distinctive shape.
Or take the haiku, that gift from Japanese literature. Traditionally about seventeen syllables arranged in a pattern of five, seven, and five. In English, this has been loosened somewhat, but the principle remains: say something profound in the space of three short breaths. The limitation forces you to distill. Every word must earn its place.
The limerick demands humor within five lines and a bouncing rhythm. The villanelle requires you to repeat two lines throughout the poem in an intricate pattern—Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night" is perhaps the most famous example, its power coming precisely from that insistent repetition.
These forms are so familiar we forget they're constraints at all.
The Lipogram: Writing Without
The lipogram takes constraint to its logical extreme. The word comes from Greek: "lipo" meaning lacking, and "gramma" meaning letter. A lipogrammatic text deliberately omits one or more letters entirely.
Wright's Gadsby was impressive, but the French writer Georges Perec raised the stakes considerably. In 1969, he published La Disparition—a three-hundred-page novel written entirely without the letter "e." In French, where "e" is even more ubiquitous than in English, this was an astonishing achievement. The title itself is a clue: "La Disparition" means "The Disappearance," and when translator Gilbert Adair rendered it into English in 1995, he titled it A Void—maintaining both the pun and the constraint.
But Perec wasn't done. Having banished "e" from one novel, he wrote another using nothing but "e" as its vowel. Les Revenentes (normally spelled "revenantes," but Perec changed it to avoid the forbidden "a") is a novella where every vowel is the letter "e." It was later translated into English as The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex.
Why would anyone do this? The answer lies in what happens when you remove the obvious path. When you can't use "the," you find yourself writing "that" or restructuring sentences entirely. When "because" is forbidden, you discover new ways to express causation. The constraint forces creativity—or rather, it reveals creativity that was always possible but rarely necessary.
The Univocalic: Only One Vowel Allowed
If lipograms remove a letter, univocalics do something equally strange: they permit only one vowel across an entire text. Canadian experimental poet Christian Bök spent seven years writing Eunoia, a book with five chapters, each using only one vowel.
The "a" chapter reads like this: "Awkward grammar appalls a craftsman." The "e" chapter: "Enfettered, these sentences repress free speech." Each chapter develops its own peculiar personality, its own rhythm, its own emotional register—all determined by which vowel is permitted.
Bök didn't just write any words that fit the constraint. He set additional rules: every chapter must describe a feast, a voyage, sex, and the act of writing itself. Each chapter uses at least ninety-eight percent of the available words for that vowel. The result is not just a technical exercise but a genuinely compelling piece of literature.
The Palindrome: Reading Both Ways
You probably know simple palindromes: "radar," "level," "madam." These words read the same forwards and backwards. But palindromes can extend to sentences ("A man, a plan, a canal: Panama") and even entire texts.
The musician known as "Weird Al" Yankovic recorded a song called "Bob" in which every line is a palindrome: "I, man, am regal—a German am I." "Never odd or even." "If I had a hi-fi." Sung in the style of Bob Dylan, it's both a parody and a genuine technical achievement.
Longer palindromes become exponentially more difficult. The writer must not only make sense going forward but ensure every letter, when reversed, contributes to meaning in the opposite direction. The constraint isn't just restrictive—it's geometric, requiring the writer to think in mirrors.
Pilish: The Mathematical Constraint
Here's a constraint you likely haven't encountered: Pilish. In Pilish, the length of each word corresponds to a digit of pi—that famous mathematical constant that begins 3.14159265...
So the first word must have three letters. The second word, one letter. The third word, four letters. The fourth word, one letter again. And so on, following pi's infinite, non-repeating sequence.
Mike Keith wrote "Cadaeic Cadenza," a short story where the first 3,835 words follow the digits of pi. He later expanded this into Not A Wake, a full book following the first 10,000 digits. The opening: "Now I fall, a tired suburbian in liquid under trees." Count the letters: 3-1-4-1-5-9-2-6-5-3-5.
This constraint is particularly fascinating because it yokes two entirely unrelated systems—language and mathematics—forcing them to collaborate. The meaning emerges not despite the arbitrary numerical sequence but somehow through it.
Constraints of Length
Some constraints don't care which letters you use, only how many. The six-word memoir, popularized by the online magazine Smith, challenges writers to compress an entire life into half a dozen words. The form supposedly originated with Hemingway, who allegedly wrote the shortest story ever: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."
The drabble is exactly one hundred words—no more, no less. The minisaga allows fifty words plus up to fifteen for a title. Twiction, born in the Twitter era, demands exactly 140 characters for a complete story or poem.
These length constraints create their own peculiar challenges. Every word carries enormous weight. Adjectives become luxuries. You find yourself counting obsessively, restructuring sentences to hit the precise target, discovering that "utilize" has two more characters than "use" and deciding whether those characters are worth their cost.
The Knight's Tour: Constraint as Architecture
Georges Perec, that master of constraint, used a mathematical principle to structure his masterpiece Life A User's Manual. The novel is set in a Parisian apartment building, imagined as a ten-by-ten grid—ten floors, ten rooms across. Each chapter focuses on one room, and the order of chapters follows a knight's tour.
A knight's tour is a chess problem: can a knight visit every square on a chessboard exactly once, moving in its distinctive L-shaped pattern? Perec adapted this to his fictional building, determining the sequence of chapters by how a knight would move through the grid.
Readers don't need to know this. The novel works beautifully as a portrait of interconnected lives, each chapter revealing residents and their histories. But the underlying constraint gives the book a hidden architecture, a skeleton that shapes everything without ever becoming visible.
The Alliterative and the Abecedarian
Walter Abish wrote Alphabetical Africa following a peculiar rule. The first chapter uses only words beginning with "a." The second chapter adds words beginning with "b." The third adds "c." By the middle of the book, he has the full alphabet available. Then he reverses: removing letters one by one until the final chapter returns to "a" words only.
The early chapters feel strange and dreamlike—how much can you say with only "a" words? "Ages ago, Alex, Allen, and Alva arrived at Antibes..." But as letters accumulate, the prose becomes more natural, more capable, more familiar. Then, as letters disappear again, meaning starts to erode, language itself seeming to decay.
The abecedarian is a related form: each section begins with the next letter of the alphabet. Several of the biblical Psalms follow this pattern in their original Hebrew, a mnemonic device that helped with memorization while creating a sense of completeness—from aleph to tav, from beginning to end.
The Oulipo: Constraints as a Movement
In 1960, a group of French writers and mathematicians formed the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle—the Workshop of Potential Literature, typically shortened to Oulipo. Their premise was radical: rather than waiting for inspiration, writers should generate texts through systematic constraints and procedures.
Perec was a member. So was Italo Calvino, Raymond Queneau, and Harry Mathews. The group wasn't interested in constraints as mere games but as tools for discovering new possibilities in language. They believed that total freedom paralyzes—too many choices leads to no choice at all. Constraints, paradoxically, liberate.
Queneau wrote Exercises in Style, retelling the same mundane anecdote—a man on a bus, a minor confrontation, a later sighting—in ninety-nine different styles. Each version follows different constraints: one uses only monosyllables, another is told backwards, another imitates legal documents, another consists entirely of interjections.
The Oulipo continues to meet regularly, now in its seventh decade, still inventing new constraints and exploring their potential.
Constraints in Other Cultures
The tradition extends far beyond European literature. In Chinese, there's a form called the "one-syllable article" that exploits the language's tonal nature. The most famous example is "Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den," a ninety-two-character text where every character is pronounced "shi" (though in different tones). Written in classical Chinese, it's perfectly comprehensible. Read aloud in modern Mandarin, it sounds like someone saying "shi" ninety-two times in a row—completely incomprehensible but technically grammatical.
The Thousand Character Classic is a Chinese poem from the sixth century where all one thousand characters are unique—no repetition whatsoever. It was used for centuries as a teaching text, and because each character appears exactly once, it was also used for numbering and classification, similar to how we might use letters or numbers.
The seventeenth-century Odia poet Upendra Bhanja wrote multiple epic poems where every sentence began with the same syllable. In Tamil, the author Charu Nivedita wrote Zero Degree, a novel that never uses the Tamil words for "one," "a," or "an"—a more severe restriction than it might initially sound, affecting countless common expressions.
Erasure: Constraint as Subtraction
Most constraints tell you what you cannot add. Erasure tells you what you must subtract. The writer begins with an existing text and removes words, leaving behind a new poem or narrative composed entirely of what remains.
Tom Phillips began A Humument in 1966, taking a Victorian novel called A Human Document and painting over most of each page, leaving visible only selected words that formed new meanings. He has revised the work multiple times over fifty years, creating different poems from the same source.
Mary Ruefle erased a Victorian novel into poetry. Janet Holmes erased Emily Dickinson. Matthea Harvey erased a biography of Charles Lamb. Each erasure creates something the original author never intended—and arguably never could have intended. The constraint is the source text itself, which determines what words are available to be saved.
Erasure is perhaps the most philosophically interesting constraint because it suggests that texts contain hidden texts, that meaning lurks within meaning, waiting for someone to subtract their way toward it.
Constraints in Comics
Visual media have their own constrained traditions. In the early 1900s, Gustave Verbeek drew The Upside Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo, a comic strip designed to be read in both orientations. You'd read six panels normally, then flip the page upside down, and the same images—now inverted—would tell the second half of the story with different captions.
David Lynch's comic strip The Angriest Dog in the World used identical artwork for every installment across nine years. Only the dialogue in the first three panels changed; the images were photocopies of the original drawing. The strip was about a dog so angry it couldn't move, frozen in perpetual rage—a perfect subject for frozen, unchanging art.
Ryan North's Dinosaur Comics follows the same principle: the same six panels appear in every strip, featuring the same dinosaurs in the same poses. Only the words change. The constraint forces creativity in dialogue while creating a strange familiarity—like visiting the same room every day to find different conversations happening.
Why Constraints Work
The psychology is counterintuitive but well-documented. When given unlimited options, people often freeze or default to the obvious. When options are limited, creativity flourishes because the mind must work around obstacles.
Dr. Seuss famously wrote Green Eggs and Ham using only fifty different words, the result of a bet with his publisher Bennett Cerf that he couldn't top the achievement of The Cat in the Hat, which used 225 words. The severe limitation produced one of the most beloved children's books ever written, its repetitive vocabulary becoming hypnotic and memorable rather than tedious.
The constraint also provides a finish line. Without boundaries, a project can expand indefinitely. When you know you must use exactly one hundred words, or omit all "e"s, or follow the knight's tour, you have a clear target. The constraint is both obstacle and compass.
There's something almost meditative about working within tight constraints. The conscious mind focuses on the technical problem—counting letters, checking for forbidden words—while the unconscious generates content. Many practitioners report that constrained writing produces surprising results precisely because the constraint occupies the editorial faculty that might otherwise censor or second-guess.
The Opposite of Constraint
What would the opposite of constrained writing look like? Perhaps automatic writing, the surrealist practice of writing without conscious control, letting words flow unfiltered. Or perhaps the stream-of-consciousness style of writers like Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, who sought to capture thought in its raw, unedited form.
But even these "unconstrained" methods have their own implicit rules. Automatic writing constrains you to speed—you cannot pause to edit. Stream of consciousness constrains you to represent consciousness accurately. Perhaps there is no truly unconstrained writing. Perhaps every act of putting words on a page involves choices that foreclose other choices, and the only question is whether those constraints are explicit or hidden.
The Oulipo would argue that acknowledging your constraints is more honest than pretending they don't exist. We all write within limitations of vocabulary, syntax, cultural context, and personal experience. The lipogram simply makes one arbitrary limitation visible.
Trying It Yourself
You don't need to write a novel without "e" to experience constrained writing. Simple exercises can reveal its power. Try writing a paragraph where every sentence has exactly ten words. Write a description of your day using only words of one syllable. Compose a letter to a friend without using the word "I."
You'll notice the constraint immediately forcing new choices. Unable to write "I think" or "I feel," you might discover more interesting ways to express thought and feeling. Limited to monosyllables, you'll find Anglo-Saxon roots replacing Latinate abstractions: "help" instead of "assistance," "end" instead of "conclusion."
The Japanese haiku master Matsuo Bashō said that to write haiku, you must first let the universe express itself through you, then trim away everything unnecessary. The constraint is the trimming tool. It cuts away the excess, leaving only what matters.
Whether you adopt the Oulipo's mathematical rigor or simply set yourself a small challenge, constrained writing offers a paradox worth experiencing: that limitations, consciously chosen and rigorously applied, can set language free.