Constrained Writing - Examples

Examples

• Gadsby is an English-language novel consisting of 50,100 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 as A Void. Perec subsequently joked that he incorporated the “e”s not used in La Disparition in the novella Les Revenentes (1972), which uses no vowels other than “e”. Les Revenentes was translated into English by Ian Monk as The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex.
• The 2004 French novel Le Train de Nulle Part (The Train from Nowhere) by Michel Thaler was written entirely without verbs.
• Experimental Canadian poet Christian Bök’s Eunoia is a univocalic that uses only one vowel in each of its five chapters.
• One famous constrained writing in the Chinese language is The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den which consists of 92 characters, all with the sound shi. Another is the Thousand Character Classic in which all 1000 characters are unique without any repetition.
• “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.
• Never Again is a novel by Doug Nufer in which no word is used more than once.
• 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 produced versions of Robinson Crusoe "in Words of One Syllable".
• Theodor Geisel, also known as Dr. Seuss, wrote the well-known children's book Green Eggs and Ham using only 50 different words on a 50 dollar bet with Bennet Cerf.
• The Gates of Paradise is a book by Jerzy Andrzejewski where the whole text is just two sentences, one of which is very long.
• Zero Degree is a postmodern novel written in 1998 by Tamil author Charu Nivedita, later translated into Malayalam and English. 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.
• Up Goer Five is a page on XKCD detailing Saturn V using only the 1000 most common English words.