Saturday, November 21, 2009

Constrained Writing Exercise #1

One of my favorite forms of writing play is constrained writing.  One of the most famous is writing without using the letter E.  There's actually a famous novel written entirely under that constraint, originally published in French, which uses even more E's, then translated, if you can believe that, into English.  Astounding.


Anyway, there are many forms of constrained writing exercise.  Basically, take any random rule and write under its limitations.  It forces unique word choice, sentence structure, form, use of poetic rewording.  Here's a quick exercise for you.  Write a complete entire sentence in which every word starts with the same letter.  This is a great one for teaching you not to rely on prepositions, the's, pronouns, and well, it just makes you think about picking just-the-right word.  Here's one I did...


Aphrodite arched and aimed an arrow at an amorously anguished Amazon.


Now it's your turn.

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