The Cambridge introduction to creative writing

Challenges of creative writing
75
play’s sake. On the continent of writing, no citizens have as much fun as in the country where the OuLiPo live.
The OuLiPo
100,000,000,000,000 Poems consists of a sequence often fourteen-line sonnets by the French writer and former Surrealist Raymond Queneau (
1961
). Each sonnet has an identical rhyme scheme. In the original edition, the sonnets are printed on the recto (right) side of each page, and the lines cut into fourteen strips. If a reader lifts one strip of line on any of the pages, except the last, a completely new sonnet is revealed. If a reader lifts more strips (more lines!)
then different sonnets continue to be revealed, and soon in many millions of permutations. Thus the title 1,00,000,000,000,000 Poems. The author calculated that someone reading the book twenty-four hours a day would require years to complete it. They would also need to keep a careful note of the combinations along the way, and obviously be enthusiastic about the book. Queneau’s poem gave birth to an idea.
As war is the continuation of diplomacy by other means, so the OuLiPo is the continuation – by other means – of literature. Writers, mathematicians and academics founded the OuLiPo or Ouvroir de litt´erature potentielle (Workshop for Potential Literature) in 1960. Subsequent membership is by election, but that need not stop you from trying out their techniques, or inventing some of your own.
Their purpose was to find out how abstract restrictions combine with imaginative writing. They advocated the use of severe, self-imposed limitations during the act of creation. As Queneau put it, they areas rats who construct the labyrinth from which they propose to escape. Two of its most famous members are Italo Calvino and Georges Perec (who wrote an entire novel without using the letter e. Still formidably active, the OuLiPo is now recognised as one of the most original, productive and provocative literary enterprises to appear in the past century.
They spawned related groups such as the OuLiPopo (potential detective fiction, with their array of methods for inventing and solving crimes the
Oupeinpo (potential painting and the Oubapo (potential comic strips),
devoted to finding new ways to combine drawing with text. All these groups have their rites annual dinners, outrageous minutes of meetings, bizarre rules and manifestos and mind-bending techniques. However, their purposes are generous, despite closed membership. They seek to expand the variety of what literature might do, rather than dictate what it cannot door should do. They area positive, enlivening presence in the discipline of creative writing, and

76
Creative writing
students and new writers are urged towards The OuLiPo Compendium (
1998
),
edited by Harry Matthews and Alastair Brotchie.
Exercises in style
One of the best places for new fiction writers to start is Queneau’s tale Exer-
cises in Style (
1947
). On a crowded bus at midday, the author observes one man accusing another of jostling him deliberately. When a seat is vacated, the first man appropriates it. Later, in another part of town, the author sees the man being advised by a friend to sew another button on his coat. That is all there is to it – except that Queneau retells this unexceptional tale ninety-nine times, employing the sonnet and the Alexandrine, ‘Ze Ffrench’ and ‘Cockney’.
An Abusive chapter heartily deplores the events Opera English lends them grandeur. It is a tour de force in stylistic demonstration, and teaches even as it pleases.
The playfulness of OuLiPo behaviour and ideas can be liberating, especially in a generative fiction or poetry workshop. There is nothing especially new about the practice of restriction being liberation. Certainly, in ancient poetry, as in mathematics, the art of numbers was the art of everything. It is a reformalisation of a practice whose roots lie in rhetorical and compositional challenges that medieval teachers set for themselves and for their students, as we saw in Chapter
One
. It echoes the tight technical work of the troubadours, as well as the games with form played by Elizabethan Court poets, and even highly popular
Victorian parlour word games enjoyed in the world before television and cinema.
An Oulipean Sunday school exercise
One of the more straightforward exercises for you to try (to gain an idea of what
OuLiPo can offer you) is Nor NOUN + 7’. Take a preexisting creative work, or one of your own. Read through the piece (it can be fiction, creative nonfiction or poetry) and note the position of all the nouns. Lookup these nouns in a dictionary one by one, and then count forwards in the dictionary by seven nouns (not seven words) for everyone. For example, taking the first stanza of John Keats famous ode (NE 872):

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