ego.istic.org

I have problems with words. Once I thought English was a really great language, because we have so many near-synonyms with differing intensities, qualifications, and connotations that it's really easy to convey fine shades of meaning concisely, and we have word order flexible enough to be able to place stress on any word in the sentence, to progressively hint at and reveal information like a dance of seven clauses, to represent the flow of thought and perception. But this flexibility has made me lazy. These days, I often find myself weighing the tones of two words almost indistinguishable in meaning, and deciding that my exact intent falls somewhere between them, and that besides, I need something with more syllables to make the sentence balance. I have grown such a perfectionist over word choice, and word order choice, that it's almost paralysing. It's not only key sentences that I endlessly revise, but the mundane sequences that carry the reader from one revelation to the next. I find myself longing for more words: not a greater vocabulary, but a greater repertoire: for linguists, the former is the set of words you can understand, and the latter is the set you use.

But even if my repertoire encompassed all of English, it would not be enough. Even now I get lost reading and re-reading entries in Roget's, hoping I've merely failed to spot the one word that means precisely what I want, fits the rhythm of the sentence, and is in keeping with the tone and register I am trying to write in; I am often disappointed to find that such a word does not yet exist. As with many writers, it makes me want to invent words, to portmanteau them together into a Frankensteinian novelty I can bend to my will; but as with Shelley's fantasy, such words often turn on their creator after being rejected by the townsfolk. The question may well be “which is to be master,” but the answer is always the reader.

What is one to do? There are ways to rehabilitate the author who wants to make his tools do double duty, and so I sympathise greatly with the Oulipo. The Oulipo is an artistic (mostly poetic) group that experiments heavily with constrained writing. Adding constraints to art often acts as a spur to creativity, regardless of the ability of the artist. At the highest level are the sonnet form, the fugue, pointillism, and other formalisms; on a more everyday plane are such limitations as canvas size and word count. Even beginners and dabblers have their colouring books and paint-by-numbers, their magnetic fridge poetry, &c. Artists (particularly poncy ones) from all media often go on about this topic, about how fun it is to create something — to tell a story or evoke a feeling — within the limitations that have been set.

This is not an art thing, but a creative thing. It is also engineers who delight in creating structures and mechanisms that defy the limits of their materials and construction techniques. Mathematicians are as delighted by the emergent behaviour of Conway's Life as painters are with the results of splashing paint straight from a bucket, or as sculptors are with their found art, or musicians with sampling. The counterpart of the fridge poetry is the construction kit, as sold by Lego, or Meccano, or K'nex. The counterpart of the colouring book is the sand-castle.

So perhaps I should take a break from freedom, from writing under only the constraints of sense and topic. Perhaps I should become Ryan North and find a ridiculous constraint. Perhaps I should go back to writing fixed-width poetry, where each line has to have exactly seventy-two characters. I could compose some music where the only allowed instrument is my fingers on the desk. I should draw pixel art or make like Brian Eno and design a sound that is exactly three and a half seconds long. Or I could write Perl in one of the Acme dialects.

I appreciate that my readers are stay-at-home types who don't go around commenting on blogs, but please do write in with your ideas for bizarre and challenging constraints.