![]() ![]() ![]() They felt that creativity and artistry required purpose and constraint to achieve potential and so they devised a series of techniques and exercises which set limits, forcing a writer to new levels of creativity by making them think ‘outside the box’. Begun in 1960 by a group of French writers and mathematicians, the founders of OuLiPo believed that the experimentalism of the Surrealist school of automatic writing (a technique where your writing wanders wherever association leads you, without any form or structure) was leading to inferior work. The OuLiPo movement (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle – workshop of potential literature), believes that limitations and rules in writing promote free creativity. Have you ever done any slow writing? Did you enjoy the challenge of a prescriptive exercise designed to help you focus on the content of a sentence? Did it fire your imagination to create a sentence with only 7 words, or an adverb and an adjective, or perhaps incorporate a rhetorical question? How do you feel about anagrams, pangrams or palindromes could you incorporate these into your writing? Would you want to? If this sounds fun to you, then it’s time to try out OuLiPo. “ Oulipians are rats who build the labyrinth from which they try to escape” – Raymond Queneau, OuLiPo founder
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