Articles and Stories

Thinking inside the box (in order to get out of it!)

Where does inspiration come from? Is it only for the ‘geniuses’ amongst us, or could anyone conjure it up with a few clever tricks? Dr Anna Kemp (Senior Lecturer in French at Queen Mary University of London and children’s author) tells us a bit about the magic of creative constraints.

Everyone loves a genius: the young poet who need only roam through the mountains, wind in hair, for inspiration to strike. From the Romantics, to the Surrealists, to Hollywood biopics, the genius is born, not made, and is subject to mysterious forces beyond their control. In short, you either have it, or you don’t. And if you don’t, then you’d better not give up the day job. It’s enough to make most aspiring writers throw down their biros in despair.

However, the history of literature also challenges the myth of the creative genius. My research focuses on the work of zany French experimental writing collective the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop for Potential Literature) – or Oulipo, for short. Oulipians see writing not as a gift so much as a craft and, like any other craft, it may be learned, honed and shared. In particular, the Oulipo is famous for inventing severe writing rules and constraints, such as Georges Perec’s notorious novel La Disparition (A void), which was composed entirely without the use of the letter E!

But how can the imagination be freed by the imposition of such strict rules? Put it this way: if I told you to write a story about anything at all, you’d probably feel quite stuck. However, if I said that the story must include a goldfish, a gun and the Queen of England then, odds are, ideas would start to sprout. Or what if I told you to write a poem, only you had to write it on the London tube and produce one line per station stop? As anyone with a looming deadline knows, there is nothing like time-pressure to squeeze those creative juices. This is the creative magic of constraint and, throughout the history of literature, Oulipians and countless other writers have played with rules and regimes to produce the most extraordinary literary works.

For many writers these rules are as simple as having an everyday writing routine: get up at 8am, block access to the internet, write 500 words (however ‘good’ or ‘bad’) then stop and go for a nice long walk. Some writers, however, develop incredibly complex games and structures to get the ink flowing. Georges Perec’s novel Life, a user’s manual, for example, combines mathematical algorithms with elements of chess to produce what he calls a ‘story- making machine’.

But what makes constraints so helpful? One reason is that rules and games can help to silence the inner critic: the little voice in your head that says ‘that’s not good’ or ‘that’s not original’ or ‘give up and go home why don’t you?!’ If we are writing within a severe set of constraints then we feel it is ‘not our fault’ if something is ‘not very good’ and that can be really liberating. We have, in a sense, handed over responsibility to the ‘machine’ and that takes off the pressure leaving us free to fail, fail again, and ultimately hit on something really interesting.

Writing within constraints can also help us to break our usual habits of thought and see things differently. What if, rather than taking your usual route to school or to work, you decided to only take streets with the letter C in the name? All the detours and deviations would allow you to see your town in another light. For Oulipians, breaking out of tired old patterns of thought is one of the key benefits of constrained writing. This is a far cry from the surrealists’ emphasis on so-called ‘automatic writing’. For surrealist writers like Aragon and Breton ‘freedom’ was to be found in simply splurging your thoughts, unfiltered and unstructured, straight onto the paper. But for Raymond Queneau, co-founder of the Oulipo, this was nonsense. Although a writer might think they have found freedom in unrestrained splurging, they usually just end up unthinkingly churning out all the old clichés that they’ve read somewhere before. As Queneau puts it, ‘he is slave to rules he is unaware of’. Oulipian writers, by contrast, force themselves out of their usual routines by subjecting themselves to consciously imposed rules and rituals and, as a result, see the world afresh.

What’s more, constraints can add rich layers of meaning to a story. Some constraints are just a fun challenge or a way of breaking the block, but others go much deeper. Let’s take the example of Perec’s E-less novel La Disparition (A Void). You could be forgiven for thinking – that’s all very clever, but so what? Isn’t it just an amusing gimmick? Is this really the way to produce great works of art? But in fact Perec’s missing E has profound significance. Perec was Jewish and, as a child, lost both of his parents in the second world war. Tellingly, the dedication of Perec’s autobiography reads ‘pour E’ (for E). As any French speakers will know, ‘pour E’ sounds exactly the same as ‘pour eux’ (for them). The missing E that haunts Perec’s novel is also the missing ‘eux’: his parents, and all the other people who were ‘disappeared’ during the war years. The ‘E’, then, becomes an unsayable, unspeakable thing that haunts and twists up the surface of his language. Without the letter E, Perec cannot write ‘mère’ (mother), ‘père’ (father) or ‘famille’ (family), nor can he write his own name. So Perec’s missing E is much more than a gimmick. It speaks of the trauma at the heart of his writing.

But what about children’s books? Alongside my university work I write children’s picture books (Dogs don’t do ballet, The Worst Princess) and young fiction (Fantastic Frankie, The Great Brain Robbery). I have never been bold enough to try writing a novel without the letter E, but like many other children’s writers – most famously Dr Seuss – I use a variety of constraints and games to generate and develop story ideas for children. We will explore some of these games today and you’ll find more to try at home in this pack. No genius necessary – just sharpen your pencils!

This article was included in a ‘creative writing toolkit’ for a creative writing workshop at the V&A Museum of Childhood in October 2017. The workshop was part of the Being Human festival which aims to bring academic research into the public realm.