Constrained Writing: Definition, Examples, and Benefits

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As a writer, you’ve probably spent some time staring at a blank page, not knowing what to write. Or, maybe you had so many ideas that you were at a loss on how to start.

Constrained writing, a literary technique where you must force yourself to write within a certain rule or pattern, may help to spark your creativity.

In this post, we’ll explore how limiting your writing can help you break through writer’s block, generate more ideas, and grow as a writer.

What Is Constrained Writing?

Constrained writing is a catch-all term for any writing technique that creates rules and limitations for your writing. These limitations can range in severity, from simply following a writing prompt to forbidding the use of a specific letter.

At first glance, it might seem counterintuitive to add more restrictions to an already creatively challenging activity, but the reality is that all writing is constrained by something. Most commonly, writers struggle with the limits of literary forms, such as style, theme, and genre.

Poetry, for example, regularly challenges poets by limiting them to a certain meter, rhyme scheme, length, and so on. The haiku, a Japanese poetry form, is famous for its 5-7-5 syllabic format.

For prose, perhaps the best example is the six-word short story, which is exactly as it sounds. It’s a kind of flash fiction that conveys an entire story through only six words. Take a look at this short line, commonly attributed to Ernest Hemingway:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

But beyond the constraints of literary form, writers are also challenged by their skill level and the limits of language. Grammatical correctness, word usage, writer’s voice, and the differences between languages can restrict your writing.

But whether it’s about form, skill, or language, constraints provide opportunities for a writer’s growth. This is why writers have begun imposing restrictions on themselves—to push them further forward.

Types of Constrained Writing

There are all sorts of constrained writing methods. Some of them involve simple restrictions, whiles others are even more self-limiting and extreme.

Here are a few examples to give you an idea of how varied constrained writing can be:

1. Lipogram

Lipograms are the most common kind of constrained writing, where a specific letter is outlawed. While outlawing uncommon letters such as X and Z isn’t much of a challenge, it becomes far more difficult when more common letters like A, E, and O are chosen.

A well-known example is Georges Perec’s novel La Disparition and its English translation A Void by Gilbert Adair. Both works lack the letter E. Other translations exclude the letter A, O, or any syllable that uses the sound of “I.”

Ella Minnow Pea is another lipogrammatic work that excludes more and more letters as the story goes on. As letters become progressively limited, its prose becomes more and more creative.

You can practice this concept by trying to write a grammatically correct and smooth-flowing work while making sure to abide by the restriction. Or, try doing a reverse lipogram instead, where each word you use must contain a particular letter.

2. Pilish

Pilish is a type of constrained writing where the lengths of consecutive words must match with the digits of the number π (Pi). So the first word needs to be three letters, then one, then four, and so on.

Here’s one of the most famous examples, which follows the first 15 digits of pi:

How I need a drink, alcoholic in nature, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics!

A more extreme example is mathematician Mike Keith’s Poe, E. Near a Raven, a retelling of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven. The entire poem goes all the way to 740 digits of pi. Here is an excerpt of the poem:

Poe, E.
      Near a Raven

Midnights so dreary, tired and weary.
    Silently pondering volumes extolling all by-now obsolete lore.
During my rather long nap – the weirdest tap!
    An ominous vibrating sound disturbing my chamber’s antedoor.
        “This,” I whispered quietly, “I ignore.”

3. Erasure

Erasure is a more visually-focused type of constrained writing. It’s a form of found poetry that involves erasing words from an existing text, with the remaining words forming a poem.

Newspaper Blackout by Austin Kleon, is a collection of poems created entirely from newspaper articles. Here is an example:

Courtesy of Austin Kleon

Practical Tips for Constraining Your Writing

While lipograms, pilish, and blackout writing are popular methods of constrained writing, there’s no stopping you from creating your own writing limitations. And they can be practically anything.

These limitations are highly personal, so the most effective ones will be those that force you to improve on aspects of your writing that aren’t as good as others. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

Don’t use adverbs if you struggle with showing and not telling.

A lot of writers often fall into the trap of telling an action or emotion rather than showing them to the reader. Not only does that make reading tedious, but it also stops readers from being fully immersed in your story. A simple trick to avoid doing this is to prohibit yourself from using adverbs.

Adverbs—words that modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs—become dangerous shortcuts in writing when used incorrectly or too frequently. Take a look at this sentence:

He angrily typed into his phone.

Here, the adverb “angrily” robs the readers of forming their own image of the situation. The thing is, you don’t need to tell your readers everything. The story should be happening inside their head, not on the page. A better way to convey the anger would then be:

His fingers rapidly stabbed into his phone as he tried to form a reply.

It’s a longer way of putting it, but it paints the scene better. Why is he being rough with his phone? Is it excitement, anger, or another emotion?

When combined with additional context, the readers arrive at the conclusion that the character is angry by themselves rather than being spoon-fed. The more imaginative space you leave, the better they’ll form a vivid image of your story.

Adverbs aren’t bad, but if you keep relying on them to convey actions and emotions, they become a crutch. So next time you write, take the long route. Eliminate using adverbs and focus on sufficiently describing your scene and situation and let the readers fill in the gaps. This way, they become an active part of the story.

Use words from a random dictionary page.

Sometimes you’ll catch yourself hesitating to use a particular word because you’re not sure what it means exactly. Or maybe you keep using the same words over and over again.

If this is a problem, then a dictionary is the natural solution. But it’s boring to simply flip the page until you find a word you need. To make it interesting, every time you start a piece, take out a dictionary, open it to a random page, and strive to use as many of the words in there as you can.

There are two things that happen when you try this method. The first and most obvious thing is that you become familiar with a lot of new words you can possibly use in your writing. The more words you know, the easier it is to create variability in your sentence structures. This way, your writings don’t sound so similar to one another.

Secondly, this forces you to be more creative with your use of words. It’s likely that you won’t need some of the words you’ll encounter.

To incorporate them, you’ll need to think more differently, and experiment with your writing. it ensures that you don’t keep on writing the same way, breaking up patterns that you’re unaware you’ve fallen into.

Write in a genre or style you don’t like or know about.

It’s important to stretch your creative muscles. And while it’s scary to step outside your comfort zone, it’s the only way you can grow more as a writer.

Your lack of knowledge or dislike of a particular aspect of writing is a constraint in itself. When you choose to remedy this, you can further explore your craft. Not only are you able to add to your knowledge and experience, but you might even discover skills, passions, and interests you didn’t know you had.

You might be one of those writers who stick to writing one or two genres. There’s nothing wrong with that. Being proficient in one is better than being average on many. And having a consistent writing style and voice definitely helps with your brand.

But it’s also easy to stagnate in the creative space you’re currently occupying. Some writers fall into patterns, churning out work that’s too similar to one another.

So even if you dread it, switch up your writing. Start a story in a genre you rarely read or write in. Use a point-of-view you don’t use. Or imitate a writing style you’re not comfortable with.

You don’t need to abandon your core genre and style. Just allow some flexibility to what you write by pursuing some side projects in your craft.

Benefits of Constrained Writing

There’s a lot of reasons why writers practice constrained writing. Sometimes it’s boredom, other times its exploration, or simply a stylistic choice. But mostly, it’s a way of improving their craft.

Here are some possible benefits to self-imposed constraints in writing:

It eliminates the paralysis of choice.

Visualize, for a moment, that writing is a white wall devoid of any features. Beside you is a selection of paints, and you are tasked with painting a masterpiece across the wall.

But what will you paint? Maybe a landscape? How about a biblical scene, kind of like the Creation of Adam? For that matter, what colors will you be using? And in what style?

With so many ideas and so many colors to choose from, you keep hesitating and in the end, you have no progress to show. That’s what writer’s block often is—the inability to start because you’ve got so many ideas that you don’t know how to start or you don’t want to write badly.

Continuing with the analogy, what if you can only use specific paints? Or you can only paint in a specific style? Won’t that make the decision process easier and faster?

When you impose restrictions on yourself, you do two things: give yourself a problem to solve and a place to start with. This stops you from being overwhelmed with so many choices so you actually get on to writing.

It makes you write unconventionally.

There are always stories to tell. The problem is on how to tell them. There’s not exactly any guide on how to do that, so sometimes writers get stuck on following what’s conventional. It’s how cliches are formed and why some stories feel repetitive.

Constrained writing makes you think of more creative ways on how to write your story. Depending on the restrictions you put on yourself, you’ll be motivated to explore new directions with your writing. When you have less to work with, you begin to look at your writing differently.

This expansion and experimentation of the bounds of literature is something that a group of French writers and mathematicians called the Oulipo specializes in. They describe it as “the seeking of new structures and patterns which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy.”

Consider the 1939 novel Gadsby by Ernest Vincent Wright. It’s a 50,000-word novel that does not include any word with the letter “E”. Imagine the thought process that went into creating a full-length novel while making sure to avoid the use of the most common letter in the English language.

It gives you something to rebel against.

Constraints are creative challenges that need to be overcome. They are representations of your limits as a writer and the limits of the forms and languages you write in. Don’t think of them as barriers, but puzzles that lead to unique writing.

Constrained writing provides you with an opportunity to push against the conventions and boundaries that have been set in literature. Consider verbs as an example. They’re an established element of language. But what would a work of literature read like if you only allowed yourself to write without using any verbs?

It may or may not lead to a more interesting work of literature. But more importantly, it serves the purpose of letting you explore the limits of literature, giving you a unique exercise that challenges your creative muscles.

It’s this kind of exploration that advances the craft of writing. Numerous writing styles, techniques, forms, and genres were formed because writers of the past got curious about what’s behind what they already know.

Push Your Creative Boundaries

Constrained writing is just one of many ways to increase your creativity as a writer. Giving yourself restrictions can broaden your thinking process and let you view things from different angles.

By doing so, you improve your skills in connecting ideas and concepts that can lead to your own blend of writing, because constrained writing is also an exercise of discovery.

When you face these constraints, you’re forced to use your mental energies in unusual ways simply because you have to. Common methods are no longer viable because you’ve purposely blocked them off. In this way, you’re tapping into things you’re unfamiliar with, giving you an opportunity to learn more about your own style and voice.

So give yourself some constraints the next time you write. It’s a fun way of thinking outside the box and looking beyond the norms of writing.

Have you tried writing constraints? Share your experience in the comments below!

 

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