OuLiPo

Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, founded 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. Members: Perec, Calvino, Roubaud, Mathews, Garréta. "Rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape" (Queneau). Constraint as generative engine.

When to use

• Writing — fiction, poetry, copy, lyrics, anything text
• Writing feels samey; constraint suppresses your default sentence shape
• Generating titles, names, taglines (short forms benefit most)
• Software constraint by analogy (code golf, no-dependency, single-file)

Don't use when

• You want the prose invisible (constraints are usually visible in the result)
• Blocked because you don't know what to say (constraint gives you how, not what)
• The constraint will compensate for not having a subject (Perec's La Disparition works because the missing E is the subject)

The constraints

Lipogram

Exclude one or more letters. Perec's La Disparition (1969): 300 pages without E. The previous sentence is a lipogram in B, F, J, K, Q, V, Y, Z.

Univocalism

Only one vowel letter. (Letter, not phoneme — "born" and "cot" both qualify in English.)

Snowball / Rhopalism

Each line one word; each word one letter longer than the previous.

S+7 (or N+7)

Replace every noun with the 7th noun after it in a dictionary. "Call me Ishmael. Some years ago..." → "Call me Ishmael. Some yes-men ago..."

Generalizes: V+7, Adj+7, N+k for any k.

Stile

Each new sentence stems from the last word/phrase of the previous: "I descend the long ladder brings me to the ground floor is spacious..."

Palindrome

Sonnets, paragraphs, or longer constructed palindromically. Perec wrote a 5,566-letter palindrome.

Prisoner's constraint (Macao)

Lipogram excluding letters with ascenders or descenders (b, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, p, q, t, y).

Pilish

Word lengths follow the digits of π: "How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics."

Sonnet machine (Queneau)

Fixed structure with interchangeable line-strips. Queneau's Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes (1961): 10 sonnets cut into 14 strips each → 10^14 combinations.

Antonymy

Replace each word with its antonym. Reveals what the text is about by what it would mean if reversed.

Procedure

For openings

1. Pick a constraint that fits your domain.
2. Write 200 words under it.
3. Note what the constraint forced you to say.
4. Decide: keep the constraint for the whole piece, or use the opening then unconstrain.

For unblocking

Apply S+7 to the stuck paragraph. The dislocation surfaces what the original was about.

Software analogues

• Lipogram → no e in identifiers
• N+7 → replace each function with the 7th in a library; describe what the result does
• Snowball → each commit one line longer
• Univocalism → variable names use one vowel
• Pilish → comment word counts follow π

Anti-slop notes

• Constrained-without-subject = exercise, not work. La Disparition works because the missing E is the subject.
• Apply strictly. Half-constrained is worse than unconstrained.
• Don't fake "Calvino-style" surface qualities. Use the actual constraints.
• Acrostics are not OuLiPo (centuries older). Use a real constraint or call an acrostic an acrostic.