just how much do you think about vowels? I mean…seriously? We all grew up with the A, E, I, O, U and sometimes Y. Right? And we all know that we can’t live without vowels. Think Slavic surnames and you know that vowels make it a little bit easier to speak.
So. When I ran across this in the Wall Street Journal, I was fascinated. OULIPO is the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or Workshop of Potential Literature, a group of writers and mathematicians. Members include Raymond Queneau, François Le Lionnais, Claude Berge, Georges Perec, and Italo Calvino. It was actually in an article by Daniel Levin-Becker, I admit I was taken. Someone who talks not only about the fun of wordsmithing, but ‘language as playground’, Lordy, my Mom would have loved him.
Glory Be! There are seventy six vowels in the first paragraph…not counting the Ys. Out of two hundred eight characters means that 36.5% of the characters used are vowels. 36.5%! Wow! If I add in the spaces, making for two hundred fifty eight characters, it’s still better than a quarter of the characters used are vowels. 29.5% actually.
What does this group of playful language experts, aficionados and others do? Their goal is “the seeking of new structures and patterns which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy.” And they identify constraints with which to establish their stories. Like writing a poem where each word is on a single line and each successive word is one letter longer, which they call Snowball. Or a Lipogram; Writing that excludes one or more letters. The previous sentence is a lipogram in B, F, H, J, K, Q, V, Y, and Z (it does not contain any of those letters).
I don’t know if my brain could do this for long. But I do get the value. As writers we are told that every word counts. Sometimes you don’t see that, especially in most commercial writing the ‘boiler room’ novels. But if you are into writing for the most discerning of readers, that is, parents and children, then you know that every word means you are telling your story the only way that you can. And a misplaced word can take the reader right out of the story and back into real life…before they’ve finished. That would be sad.