Literary constraints
From English 194 Wiki Site
Literary Constraints are different stylistic approaches to writing that confine the author to certain specific regulations. The Oulipo group, from France, specializes in identifying and elaborating on existing contraints and creating new ones. Some indicative examples of literary constraints include: Georges Perec's lipogram, La disparition, which is 300 pages long and does not include the letter “e”; Raymond Queneau's Excercises in Style which tells one simple story in 99 different ways; or his poem One Hundred Thousand Billion Sonnets, where one fourteen line sonnet can be read with the lines in any order while still maintaining the same rhyme scheme and grammatical structure. Other types of writing constraints require that an author only use certain consonants, or maintain continual alliteration, or change every noun with the noun that falls seven places ahead of it in the dictionary. There are many other types of constraints, but these few should give a general understanding of their function.
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