The Oulipos Made Me Do It.

I guess I should have warned you previously, but I am taking two (very) different writing classes this semester and a lot of the exercises I end up writing find their way onto this here blog. Well below is yet another of the weekly “constraint” exercises I’m doing for one of the classes. This is in the tradition of the Oulipo writers of the 1960s who - because they were French and hated themselves, or something - enjoyed imposing artificial constraints on their own writing. There are legitimately good things to be said about why these sorts of exercises are good for writers, though I’m still not entirely convinced that they are good for the writing.

Either way, here is the artificial constraint I was operating under this week:

Make a diagram of the house you grew up in and assign each of the rooms a letter.  Make little pieces of paper with each of the letters printed on them.  Make 10 each of these little pieces of paper.  Scramble them up and draw 25 of them. Then write a story moving from room to room in that order.

So that sounds … complicated, right? Well it was, but it also turned out to be kind of fun. I bent the rules some because this was supposed to be autobiographical and what I wrote is only mostly autobiographical-ish.

Between this autobiographical stuff and my creative non-fiction class, I am seriously getting annoyed with having to write about me. I have no interest in writing about me. What I like to do is this: I like to just make people up and then make them say and do stuff that I think is interesting. So yes, that is entirely about me, but in that situation I’m not writing about me. All I am doing there is bending a tiny fictional universe to my will.

If none of that makes any sense it is because I am very tired right now because I had a long day and I also spent almost an hour on the treadmill too! But I think I did have a point in saying all that stuff about writing … what was it? … thinkthinkthink … oh yeah!

Please remember that the piece of writing below is only autobiographical-ish. It is more true to tone than to fact. I would NOT submit this to my non-fiction class because I blurred things a little bit too much and borrowed a few too many details from people who are not me. Also, because of the constraints of the exercise I took a tact that is more atmospheric and interstitial than I normally would have otherwise. (BTW, I caually use the word ‘interstitial’ now, apparently. Thanks grad school.)

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