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:
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.[2]
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 Les Revenentes [
fr] (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.
"
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.
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.
Zero Degree is a postmodern lipogrammatic novel written in 1998 by
Tamil author
Charu Nivedita, later translated into Malayalam and English. The Tamil words "oru" and "ondru" (the English equivalents are "a", "an" and "one") have not been mentioned anywhere in the novel, except one chapter. Keeping with the numerological theme of Zero Degree, the only numbers expressed in either words or symbols are numerologically equivalent to nine (with the exception of two chapters). This Oulipian ban includes the very common word one. Many sections of the book are written entirely without punctuation, or using only periods.
In the book A Gun Is Not Polite, author Jonathan Ruffian rearranges given sentences containing the word "gun" as found on the internet into microfiction.
Uruguayan musician, comedian and writer
Leo Maslíah's 1999 novel Líneas (Lines) is written entirely with paragraphs comprising a single sentence.
A novel Gorm, Son of Hardecnut (Горм, сын Хёрдакнута)[6] (see
Gorm the Old) by Peter Vorobieff is written in Russian without any words borrowed from English, French, Latin, or modern German since the 17th century (similar to
Anglish). The book also never uses many common words, including "human", "please", and "thank you".
The 17th-century
Odia poet
Upendra Bhanja wrote multiple epics (Satisha Bilasa, Kala Kautuka, Baidehisha Bilasha, etc.) with the same syllable at the beginning of each sentence.[clarification needed]
Brian Raiter, a computer programmer, wrote a more than 4,000-word article explaining Albert Einstein's
theory of relativity using only words of four letters or less.[8]
Grant Maierhofer's Ebb, a novel, was written entirely without the letter A, and published in 2023 by Kernpunkt Press. "It concerns a community of artists and others, engaging in their lives and figuring things out. A Oulipian experiment wherein things fall apart."[9]
Comics
Notable examples of constrained comics:
Gustave Verbeek's The Upside Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo, a weekly 6-panel comic strip in which the first half of the story was illustrated and captioned right-side-up, then the reader would turn the page up-side-down, and the inverted illustrations with additional captions describing the scenes told the second half of the story, for a total of 12 panels.
The Angriest Dog in the World a comic strip by
David Lynch. Each four-panel comic has identical artwork. The only change between each comic is the dialogue in the first three panels.
Dinosaur Comics which uses the same artwork, with only dialogue changing.
Watchmen is created with a number of formal constraints; issue #5 in particular, entitled "Fearful Symmetry", follows a palindromic structure.
^Bilingual Homophonous Poetry – Italo-Hebraic Bilingual Homophonous Poem by linguist
Ghil'ad Zuckermann, in which the Hebrew poem sounds identical to the Italian one, both making full sense – see Zuckermann, Ghil'ad (2006), "Shir Du-Leshoni" (Bilingual Poem), Ho!, Literary Magazine 3, pp. 256–257.
Mike Schertzer, in Cipher and Poverty (The Book of Nothing), created a three-level acronymic poem. Beginning with a name a verse was created for which the name was the acronym. This verse was then expanded, and then again. The final verse is 224 words long (which means the previous verse, its corresponding acronym, contains 224 letters).
Spineless Books, an independent publishing house dedicated to constrained literature.
Quadrivial QuandaryArchived 2010-05-26 at the
Wayback Machine, a community website that challenges participants to write a single sentence containing all four words in a daily selection
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:
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.[2]
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 Les Revenentes [
fr] (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.
"
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.
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.
Zero Degree is a postmodern lipogrammatic novel written in 1998 by
Tamil author
Charu Nivedita, later translated into Malayalam and English. The Tamil words "oru" and "ondru" (the English equivalents are "a", "an" and "one") have not been mentioned anywhere in the novel, except one chapter. Keeping with the numerological theme of Zero Degree, the only numbers expressed in either words or symbols are numerologically equivalent to nine (with the exception of two chapters). This Oulipian ban includes the very common word one. Many sections of the book are written entirely without punctuation, or using only periods.
In the book A Gun Is Not Polite, author Jonathan Ruffian rearranges given sentences containing the word "gun" as found on the internet into microfiction.
Uruguayan musician, comedian and writer
Leo Maslíah's 1999 novel Líneas (Lines) is written entirely with paragraphs comprising a single sentence.
A novel Gorm, Son of Hardecnut (Горм, сын Хёрдакнута)[6] (see
Gorm the Old) by Peter Vorobieff is written in Russian without any words borrowed from English, French, Latin, or modern German since the 17th century (similar to
Anglish). The book also never uses many common words, including "human", "please", and "thank you".
The 17th-century
Odia poet
Upendra Bhanja wrote multiple epics (Satisha Bilasa, Kala Kautuka, Baidehisha Bilasha, etc.) with the same syllable at the beginning of each sentence.[clarification needed]
Brian Raiter, a computer programmer, wrote a more than 4,000-word article explaining Albert Einstein's
theory of relativity using only words of four letters or less.[8]
Grant Maierhofer's Ebb, a novel, was written entirely without the letter A, and published in 2023 by Kernpunkt Press. "It concerns a community of artists and others, engaging in their lives and figuring things out. A Oulipian experiment wherein things fall apart."[9]
Comics
Notable examples of constrained comics:
Gustave Verbeek's The Upside Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo, a weekly 6-panel comic strip in which the first half of the story was illustrated and captioned right-side-up, then the reader would turn the page up-side-down, and the inverted illustrations with additional captions describing the scenes told the second half of the story, for a total of 12 panels.
The Angriest Dog in the World a comic strip by
David Lynch. Each four-panel comic has identical artwork. The only change between each comic is the dialogue in the first three panels.
Dinosaur Comics which uses the same artwork, with only dialogue changing.
Watchmen is created with a number of formal constraints; issue #5 in particular, entitled "Fearful Symmetry", follows a palindromic structure.
^Bilingual Homophonous Poetry – Italo-Hebraic Bilingual Homophonous Poem by linguist
Ghil'ad Zuckermann, in which the Hebrew poem sounds identical to the Italian one, both making full sense – see Zuckermann, Ghil'ad (2006), "Shir Du-Leshoni" (Bilingual Poem), Ho!, Literary Magazine 3, pp. 256–257.
Mike Schertzer, in Cipher and Poverty (The Book of Nothing), created a three-level acronymic poem. Beginning with a name a verse was created for which the name was the acronym. This verse was then expanded, and then again. The final verse is 224 words long (which means the previous verse, its corresponding acronym, contains 224 letters).
Spineless Books, an independent publishing house dedicated to constrained literature.
Quadrivial QuandaryArchived 2010-05-26 at the
Wayback Machine, a community website that challenges participants to write a single sentence containing all four words in a daily selection