A friend of mine has a blog that has an interesting twist; the blog entries are stories limited to 250 words. It makes for some interesting reading, because she knows how to get the job done within that budget.
This isn’t a new idea (I’ve seen several variations on the idea) and I’ve even played along myself, trying to write a story using only six sentences. It was fun, but I confess that I needed to bend the rules (or at least, I felt I violated the spirit of the rules) by abusing punctuation and sentence construction a bit. Some people seemed to enjoy the result, however, although perhaps enjoy isn’t the right word. It’s a sad story.
I’ve also participated in games involving writing haiku that include a certain set of words, or address a certain theme, or something along those lines. Since the structure of a haiku is rigid, there are very few decisions to be made or distractions to conquer about form or meter, which actually makes things much easier in some ways.
But the idea popped into my head that there might be different sorts of limits or restrictions to writing that one could attempt to explore. Instead of a word or sentence limit, or an even more constrained verse form, perhaps it would be possible to ignore structure and attempt to limit some of the other fundamental building blocks of narrative prose.
For example, could I write a short story that did not use any similes or metaphors? (Immediately an argument would spring up about what constitutes a metaphor; when we use a non-specific word such as “food” or “eating” are we invoking the ideals for “food” and “eating” and applying them as metaphors? Perhaps there is some way to split this hair with an adequate definition of metaphor, but I don’t usually like playing games with rules I can barely understand)
As another example, could I write a story with a completely linear structure? Again, I’m not sure what I’m talking about when I say the words “linear structure”, so I’ll have to try to be more careful. What I mean is a story that leads with no twists and turns. It is as predictable as a roller-coaster, following an utterly predictable course but interesting (or even thrilling) nonetheless? Great writers can do this; I can reread Wodehouse until I’ve got pages on end nearly memorized, but I still enjoy the ride. Like listening to familiar music, things do not have to be surprising, novel, or unexpected in order to be enjoyable, but I do not usually write in this way. I write jokes. There’s almost always a twist at the end, and that’s the amusing part. What if I disallowed the surprise twist?
Could I write a story that was simply a naked conversation? No clues as to the speakers identities except what they provide, in an uncontrived way, as part of the conversation? No “he said, rubbing his freshly-slapped face” or “she shouted, her lips twisted in rage”, but just the words, without annotation or adornment, and, most importantly, without artifice. It’s been done, but can I manage it?
Maybe I should take some baby steps first.
