Debra Spark

We all know what sucks about the last almost three years. So, in the interest of not re-hashing the obvious, my go-to, let’s-get-to-know-each-other question for the undergraduates I taught in 2020 and 2021 was “What’s one positive thing about the last two years of your life?” Which is only a way of asking: “Of what use constraint?” 

We Americans, we think we don’t like it! Don’t “control” our guns. (Oh, please.) Don’t limit our civil liberties. (Agreed, unless it’s your civil liberty not to wear a mask in the first two years of the pandemic. In which case: Oh, please.) 

Poets, of course, don’t need a global pandemic to puzzle through the question. They’ve been playing with constriction forever. What’s a sonnet or villanelle or ghazal but an effort to find a very particular, and maybe oddly shaped, container, for the big mess of life?

We prosers are crankier about restriction. After considering length—shall I write a short short, story, novella, or novel?—we haven’t particularly played with what boundary-setting might mean for our efforts.

We haven’t unless we are members of the French Oulipo, which is the acronym for the Ouvrir Literature Potentialle. The Oulipo was founded in 1960 by a French mathematician and a writer, two men eager to explore prose written under structural constraints. 

Those who study creative writing in America are often asked to respond to a prompt (in itself a constraint) with “free writing,” i.e., writing where you write as fast as you can, always keeping your pen moving forward, and not stopping to correct yourself. With free writing, if you cannot think of anything to write, you still write. My hand hurts. I wish I didn’t eat that brick of mac and cheese for lunch. Whatever comes to mind.

Free writing, though, is the antithesis of what the Oulipo was all about. The term “free writing” was popularized in 1973 by Peter Elbow, though he didn’t coin the term, but the conceit can be traced back to the Dadaists and surrealists, who embraced accident, chance, and the subconscious. They were interested in what might emerge if you didn’t censor yourself. 

What kind of restriction did the Oulipo favor? 

Three of the most often mentioned Oulipian constraints are the lipogram, N+7, and the Knight’s Tour.

A lipogram involves writing without using a specific letter. George Perec famously wrote his 300-page novel, A Void, without using the most common letter in his native French, which is “e.” 

N+7 is a poetry constraint in which every noun in a poem is replaced with the seventh noun in the dictionary after the original noun. So, the first line of Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” (“The art of losing isn’t hard to master”) becomes “The artisan of losing isn’t hard to matador.” 

The Knight’s Tour relates to the math problem whereby a knight must move in the standard L-pattern on a chess board and visit all the squares on the board, but only once. Perec used the Knight’s Tour for his novel Life: A User’s Manual by writing about a ten-story apartment building with ten rooms, each room getting assigned a number, and the order of the chapters in the novel determined by the knight’s move. If this doesn’t quite make sense, imagine halving a ten-story apartment building, in order to see its ten-by-ten nature as a visual that resembles the eight-by-eight squares of a chessboard. The chapters then shift floors and rooms according to the knight’s moves. 

The lipogram and N+7 constraints work on the word level. The Knight’s Tour has to do with organization. But Oulipians tried other things. For instance, Oulipian cofounder Raymond Queneau wrote a book called Exercises in Style, in which he recounted the same essentially meaningless encounter on a bus 99 times, each time changing the style of the telling. 

The book starts with a template chapter titled “Notation”: 

Notation 

In the S bus, in the rush hour. A chap of about 26, felt hat with a cord instead of a ribbon, neck too long, as if someone’s been having a tug-of war with it. People getting off. The chap in question gets annoyed with one of the men standing next to him. He accuses him of jostling him every time anyone goes past. A sniveling tone which is meant to be aggressive. When he sees a vacant seat he throws himself on to it.

Two hours later, I meet him in the Cour de Rome, in front of the gare Saint-Lazare. He’s with a friend who’s saying: “You ought to get an extra button put on your overcoat.” He shows him where (at the lapels) and why. ¹

A later chapter called “Metaphorically” begins:

In the center of the day, tossed about the shoal of travelling sardines in a coleopter with a big white carapace, a chicken with a long, featherless neck suddenly harangues one, a peace abiding one, of their number, and it parlance, moist with protest, was unfolded upon the airs. ²

And here’s the start of a chapter titled “Surprises”:

How tightly packed in we were on that bus platform! And how stupid and ridiculous that young man looked! ³

Unfortunately, with notable exceptions—apparently George Perec’s A Void is brilliant—reading the work of the Oulipo can be challenging, as with the novel Never Again by Doug Nufer, in which the author never uses a word more than once. The book opens: 

When the racetrack closed forever I had to get a job. Wants ads made wonderlands, founding systems barely imagined. Adventure’s imperative ruled nothing could repeat. Redirections dictated rigorously, freely. Go anywhere new: telephone boiler rooms, midnight grocery shooting galleries, prosthetic limb assembly plants, hazardous waste-removal sites; flower delivery, flour milling, million-dollar bunko schemes. Do anything once; then, best of all, never again. ⁴

As a game, these efforts can be fun, the wordsmithing clever, but not always, in the long run, very interesting for the reader who wants more than verbal dexterity out of prose.

When does figuring out the puzzle of the form produce something more than the solution to the puzzle? When does one arrive at literature or art? 

Most people in this country know about Theodore Geisl’s limited vocabulary effort. The author had already written several books, when his publisher felt the need to address a 1950s educational crisis. Children weren’t learning how to read, according to two well-regarded articles of the day, because Dick and Jane primers were too boring. So Houghton Mifflin asked Geisl to write “a story that first-graders could not put down.” The constraint? The list of 300 vocabulary words that the publishing house had determined six-year-old children could read. Geisl thought the assignment easy enough. He imagined it would take him a week or so. In fact, it took almost eighteen months. Initially, he thought he’d write something called The Queen Zebra, but he found neither “queen” nor “zebra” on the list. Something with a bird? “Wing” and “fly” were on the list, but not “bird.” Frustrated, Geisl—better known as Dr. Seuss—decided to go down the list and pick the first two words that rhymed for the title of his book. And so: The Cat in the Hat. 

This story is true. More or less. Geisl told it many times but the details varied. Still, in this case, limited vocabulary produced a children’s classic, Geisl’s first hugely popular book. The puzzle solved and worth reading. ⁵

What does this all mean for writers of adult literature?

Raymond Queneau repeated a template and in doing so, his style changed, but nothing else. He didn’t provide deeper meaning, a greater access into the material or psyches of his characters. 

What might repetition as a constraint look like when aiming for art? And what are some other ways of considering constraint in contemporary fiction? Rick Moody’s “Boys,” Josh Ferris’s “The Breeze,” and Bonnie Jo Campbell’s “The Answers to Ed’s Question” offer some answers. 

In Rick Moody’s “Boys,” almost all the story’s sentences start with a variation of the phrase, “Boys enter the house.” Moody opens by writing:

Boys enter the house, boys enter the house. Boys, and with them the ideas of boys (ideas leaden, reductive, inflexible), enter the house. Boys, two of them, wound into hospital packaging, boys with infant-pattern baldness, slung in the arms of parents, boys dreaming of breasts, enter the house. ⁶

Over the course of four pages, the boys age from infancy to childhood to teen years and beyond. As they do, the sentences pile up, each with a concrete example of something the boys do that also establishes the boys’ collective nature. They are, by turns, needy, violent, cruel, sports-loving, guilty, destructive, rude, physically gross—sorry, boys!—horny, worried, and self-conscious. Then, the boys learn their sister has cancer, and the sentences-pattern continues, but the boys’ collective nature shifts. They are described as kind, worried, intoxicated, grief-stricken, loving, argumentative, and increasingly opinionated about politics and life. A late shift in the story introduces important events in the boys’ lives: a wedding, a car crash, a period of long absence from the house, fishing trips, and finally their father’s heart attack, which occasions the only significant break in the sentence pattern. 

Moody closes the story with a handful of phrases (all that start with the word “here”) that describe the literal threshold over which the boys have been stepping all these years. Why this shift? Because the boys, in the wake of their father’s heart attack, are themselves at a threshold, as the story makes clear with its final words: “Here are the scuff marks, here’s where there were once milk bottles for the milkman, here’s where the newspaper always landed, here’s the mail slot, here’s the light on the front step, illuminated, here’s where the boys are standing, as that beloved man is carried out. Boys, no longer boys, exit.” 

What’s the point of writing with the constraint of linguistic repetition here? Certainly the rhythmic pleasure, but also to let the reader know what stays stable (“the boys”), as the story rushes through the decades. The boys are always this thing until the final sentence, when they are not, when they are no longer sons, and are emphatically men.

Example two. Joshua Ferriss’s “The Breeze” begins with a woman in Brooklyn, sitting on her concrete balcony when her husband returns home from work. The loveliness of the early evening breeze gives her “a sense of excitement and mild dread. What if she failed to make the most of what remained of this perfect spring day?” This is the story’s conundrum. What should husband and wife do for the evening? The wife wants something. The two take the subway into Manhattan, have a picnic dinner, and then super-satisfying sex, as they hide behind trees in Central Park. After, they meet old friends at a beer garden for a happy drink and go home ebullient. A perfect night. ⁷ 

Then, without a verbal transition or any phrases to indicate the story’s intent (though there is a line break), the story repeats this basic set up (in full or in part) seventeen times. Initially, it is not clear that the opening scene has begun again, but eventually the essential aspects of the opening scene clearly recur, but not with such happy results. In one iteration, both husband and wife want the other to decide what to do for the night. The two are irritable and not on the same page, the idea of going to a movie (which they always do) frustrates the wife. In another version, they are angry and blame each other for not making the night more enjoyable. Or the hot subway into the city feels “purgatorial.” Or the wife has a good moment and the husband doesn’t. Beyond the element of the breeze, Manhattan, transportation, dinner, sex (or, no sex, as the story goes on), movie option, and drinks with friends, the recurring elements have to do with choice and desire. Clearly, these topics are at the story’s center: who makes the choice, who owns the desire, what should be done, are one’s needs understood or not? The evening feels (for both spouses) defining of the whole marriage. She is restless, and he is complacent. Or is that what it is? Does it even matter if you don’t make the most of a night that should have potential?

The variations, especially given the wife who wonders quite explicitly what she “should” do with the evening, suggest the possibilities, and because the possibilities always go in the same direction (the couple never decide to head to Coney Island instead of into the city), what truly varies is the emotional response to the moment. In a way, the story feels like Existentialism 101, suggesting that if you are the product of the choices you make, then this is a happy marriage or a crappy one, depending on how the couple directs and responds to their evening.

A final example of a story that uses repetition: Bonnie Jo Campbell’s short story “The Solutions to Ben’s Problem” consist of seven paragraphs, each listed with a subtitle, Solution #1, Solution #2, etc. Ben’s problem is not articulated, save (quite clearly) through the answers.

Here’s the story’s beginning: 

The Solution to Ben’s Problem

Solution #1

While Connie is at the store buying formula and diapers, load up the truck with the surround-sound home entertainment system and your excellent collection of power tools, put the baby in the car seat, and drive away from this home you built with your own hands. Not to your mother’s, because Connie will come looking. Expect that after you leave, she will break all the windows in this living room, including the sliding glass door, which you’ve already replaced twice. The furnace will run and run. Then she will go to your mother’s house, curse at your mother and possibly attempt to burn that house down. Connie has long admired the old three-generation farm house for its big windows and cupola, and the thought that she will never live there will infuriate her.

Solution #2

Wait until Connie comes back from the “store,” distract her with the baby, then cut her meth with Drano, so that when she shoots it up, she dies. ⁸

The solutions include escape, murder, suicide, a call to a help line, and a decision to maintain the status quo, all possibilities (save the final) expressed in extreme terms to illustrate the out-of-control nature of the characters’ lives, given the wife is a hopeless meth addict. 

The story ends with a footnote from Campbell: “A person I love called me and told me his wife had locked herself in the bathroom and was shooting up meth. He asked me what in the hell he should do.” The “in the hell” further establishes that this is a desperate, impossible situation.

So, the reason for the repetition—story as list of possible alternatives—has to do with the inspiration for the story. But the structure serves other purposes as well. The solutions clarify two things: 1) the present moment of the story, the “now” in which the wife pretends to go to the store for baby supplies but actually to see her dealer, and 2) the back-story with the couple’s relationship history. We learn Connie has been an addict for a long time and the husband who otherwise seems like the responsible party (he’s the one who cares for the baby and fixes what Connie breaks) has been complicit, believing she would get better, even though she was not only clearly addicted when pregnant, but also during earlier pregnancies that she lost, likely due to the addiction. That is: the husband went ahead and tried to have a child with Connie despite all the reasons not to. We also learn that the husband has hit Connie, not as much or as hard as she has hit him, and always in response to her slugging first, but yes, he has hit her. So, the morality of the story (wife: bad/out of control/addicted; husband: good/in charge/sober) isn’t exactly all that easy.

The story’s possible solutions—which include things like blow your head off with a shotgun, smash her head against the chimney—are not really solutions, but indications of the husband’s desperation. The story ends with the only undramatic suggestion—make dinner for the family, get the wife to eat when she comes home. This alternative indicates that, for the moment, the crisis is not going to end. The problem is going to be managed, not remedied. We need the repetition to understand that nothing is working. The content of the story tells us one thing, the form (the constraint) echoes the point.

Moody, Ferris, and Campbell were probably not thinking about the Oulipo or Queneau’s repeated bus template when they chose to use repetition. 

The Memphis-born writer Mark Dunn, however, was likely quite aware of the Oulipo, when he wrote Ella Minnow Pea. Dunn started his creative life as a filmmaker then segued into playwriting, while working at the rare books division of the New York Public Library. “I fell into theatre and found I really loved it,” he says. “I loved telling stories through dialogue. I enjoyed all the restrictions that writing for the theatre puts on a writer. I welcomed the challenge of telling stories in two hours with a handful of characters on a minimalist stage, incorporating the audience’s imagination in the storytelling.” ⁹ 

Dunn transferred that love of constraints to his novels. American Decameron tells one hundred stories, each in a different year of the 20th century.Ibid. A Life consists of the footnotes to a three-legged circus entrepreneur’s biography, putatively published because the actual biography has been lost. Or so goes the novel’s conceit. Ella Minnow Pea is Dunn’s best-known work. The title is the full name of the novel’s protagonist, Ella, but also a play on consecutive letters of the alphabet. The novel makes use of lipograms—works that omit select letters—but Ella Minnow Pea is also a novel in letters, given that it is an epistolary novel. 

The premise of Dunn’s novel is quite fanciful. Nollop, an imaginary island off the coast of South Carolina was once home to Nevin Nollop, supposedly the author of the famous pangram “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” (A pangram is a sentence that uses all the letters of the alphabet.) The inhabitants of the island have a peculiar sensitivity to language, as exhibited in their mannered way of speaking. They consider Nollop something of an omniscient forefather. A centrally located statue on the island has Nollop’s famous phrase written out in tiles. One day, the tiles start falling from the statue. The island’s governing body interprets this to mean that Nollop wants the fallen letter to be banned from all communication, written and spoken. 

An absurd conceit, of course, but one that explains why the novel’s full title (in its original printing) was Ella Minnow Pea: A Progressively Lipogramatic Epistolary Fable. In a subsequent printing, the subtitle was simplified to A Novel in Letters. 

Because of the edict about the falling letters, characters in the novel must communicate using fewer and fewer words, as the reader moves from chapter to chapter, and if the townspeople do not abide by the government’s edicts, they will be severely punished. To save themselves, the citizens must prove that Nollop is not omniscient by inventing a pangram that uses fewer letters than Nollop’s “The quick brown fox” sentence, which is what they do and how the novel’s crisis resolves. In the end, the characters are saved by the very language that restricts them through the body of the story.

This rather silly conceit is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, though I agree with the Dallas Morning Herald book reviewer who wrote, “This exceptionally zany book will quickly make you laugh.” ¹⁰ A sentence that is a pangram.

Given the terms Dunn sets for himself, he needs word play to tell his story. He uses neologisms, hybrid and portmanteau words, and euphemisms like “intoxi-tipsy” for you-can-guess-what and “does in” for “dozen”; also phrases like “oerittious ask-me-now” and “travailous times.” Rather than being irritating, the writing is wildly clever and quite funny. 

The book is also not written for the game of the thing. The novel’s true concern is censorship and totalitarian government and how people respond when subject to such forces. Or to say the same thing in another way: the very restriction that is part of the novel’s word play is the novel’s narrative but also the narrative’s topic. 

Specifically, the story examines the government’s increasing restriction of personal liberty, its police state tactics and irrationality, and its privileging of faith over science. As the novel moves forward, the end result of the public edict is more power and property for the governing body and less and less for the island’s citizens. 

The novel also illustrates how people respond to totalitarianism. People are, of course, going to be upset, even upset enough to flee, and characters do move off the island. But most remain, trying to cope in manners admirable (some choose civil disobedience) or unadmirable (others opt for personal safety over societal good). Some try to reconcile themselves to their circumstances by thinking that things won’t be so bad. Still others are fearful or internally dissenting but publicly quiet. Some characters are resigned. A few go crazy. Others despair. As restrictions continue, society breaks down, citizens betraying one another or behaving badly. Even the kindest have to question their relationships, because they cannot discern their neighbors’ true feelings about the government’s edicts. No one feels safe, but some islanders engage in resistance, underground or open. Love and solidarity flower in the difficult soil. Perhaps surprisingly, this somewhat cartoony novel offers a description of Stalin, Hitler, Mao Zedong, and Donald Trump. On Amazon, the book most frequently bought with Ella Minnow Pea is George Orwell’s 1984.

Of course, there are many other categories of constraints, among them image, phrase, and form constraints.

In the early 1960s, a collective attempt at an image constraint was spurred by a classroom anecdote. At the University of Virginia, a girl with electric red hair always attended her creative writing class in a black raincoat. This was in the pre-punk days, so her look attracted attention. One day, she disappeared from class; apparently, she’d dropped out of school. Subsequently, a different student (actually a student who would later become a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet) presented a story he’d written about a girl in a black raincoat. Everyone, save the class professor, George Garrett, was aghast. Apparently, the class didn’t think the student should be writing about a “real” person in fiction. “Pedagogically the answer to all this,” Garrett later wrote, “was the requirement that everybody in class should go and write something about a girl in a black raincoat. The idea was, of course, to let them learn by doing some of the ways and means by which fiction can shape and transform the factually ‘real’ into something else, another kind of truth.” ¹¹ The exercise, perhaps due to a misunderstanding, moved past the classroom, and writers in the Virginia area started submitting “girl in the black raincoat” stories to Garrett, as if he were assembling an anthology, which he wasn’t. But, as the pieces accumulated, he thought, “Why not?” Which is how the anthology The Girl in the Black Raincoat came to be.

Flash forward twenty years to a radio station rather than a classroom. NPR’s Susan Stamberg liked to incorporate literary games into her show “Weekend Edition.” She had already challenged a handful of authors to write a chain novel and others to write a chain mystery novel. Now, she was casting about for a new idea. She invited Garrett to pick an image for six writers to use for an on-air story. A student of Garrett’s had recently written a piece with a wedding cake in the middle of the road, so that’s what he picked: a visual that has all sorts of potential, since it presents a clear narrative dilemma—why is the cake in the road?—and also suggests a tale with potential weight, given the import we conventionally ascribe to weddings and the metaphorical possibilities for a life that is in the phrase “the middle of the road.” 

The image constraint offers inspiration through a concrete visual (preferable to an abstract prompt like “write something about love”) and some potential themes. Anything more? Perhaps not, though Garrett describes his image constraint as “exemplify(ing) the spirit of play, of free play, which is at the heart and soul of so much art.” 

NPR provides more constraints that are really prompts, i.e., basically goads to the imagination, invitations to climb on the jungle gym of art in their three-minute fiction contests, posted online. In one, Brad Melzer suggests writing a story that revolves around a US president. In another, Karen Russell assigns a story in which someone finds something lost and decides not to return it. 

What about phrase constraints? The seven stories in Joan Wickersham’s The News from Spain all use (and are titled with) the phrase “the news from Spain.” The phrase was initially generative, popping into Wickersham’s head when she could not write her idea down. Subsequently, she forgot everything save the title. Later, she realized she could call the result of a different idea “The News from Spain.” And still later, while at a writers’ colony, she binge-wrote three stories, and titles them all “The News From Spain.” 

Was the whole idea a little gimmicky? Perhaps, she thought, and planned to drop the conceit, delete the line, and change the titles, if the idea proved to be no more than something to get her going. But, as she worked, she liked the idea of her stories talking to one another through the phrase, and felt that the words (which she used both literally and metaphorically) captured something “about longing and hopeless elusiveness,” as she puts it. Perhaps the words didn’t hit a “logical nerve,” but they did hit an “emotional nerve,” one which suited her stories, focused on what-she-calls “asymmetrical love.” ¹² Basically longing.

Much of Wickersham’s work—her first novel, a subsequent heartbreaking memoir about her father’s suicide, and the News from Spain—is about wanting what you cannot have, something desired that is unavailable for whatever reason. Her subconscious offered up a phrase that felt like a surprise gift, but it is also a driving preoccupation. The phrase, and the idea of using it repeatedly, provided Wickersham with the container she needed, and once she had it, the material to fill the container spilled out of her, a repeat of what happened with her memoir about her father’s suicide. In that case, material with which she had struggled for an entire decade, drafting the tragedy first as a novel, then as a straightforward memoir, only worked when she landed on the idea of a “suicide index,” substituting short chapters with thematic headings—like “suicide: how to talk to a child about”—for standard narration.

In the collection There’s Something I Want You to Do, Charles Baxter also reuses the title phrase in each of his stories. His conceit relates to what he calls “the request moment.” Stories, fiction students are always told, are about desire. Someone wants something but can’t get it because of something and so something happens. Desire-obstacle-result. But a request, Baxter argues, is a “transferred desire” and one that complicates narratives, because a request always involves an interpersonal relationship. In one of the collection’s stories, a mother tells her son she wants him to get married. If the son then goes looking for a wife, that search is in the context of a desire that may not be his own. A request takes place in a social world, desire within a particular culture or milieu. Requests inevitably involve power, and as the writer Peter Turchi once wrote in an essay called “Power Plays,” one way of conceiving of stories is in terms of power: types of power and exchanges of power. ¹³ A request moment also involves obligation—and perhaps a moral or emotional conundrum: should I or must I do what is asked of me? So, Baxter’s phrase is a constraint, but one that powers his stories, offering a partial plot line (who wants who to do what?), as well as a chance to explore morality, a character’s interior life, the personal desire or disinclination to do something, and the interpersonal, social, and sociological relationships of a given world. ¹⁴

Though fiction writers don’t tend to think about constraint, save in terms of length, a length constraint can also be a form constraint. At the beginning of the pandemic, Dinty Moore published an apropos page-long, one-sentence story (on a website devoted to one-sentence stories) called “Pandemic Rant.” Six-word stories have been around since people claimed (apparently without evidence) that Hemingway wrote the epic, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” About a decade ago, Twitter fiction, i.e., 140-character stories appeared, as when Teju Cole’s concerns about the war on terror led him to tweet (over the course of twenty minutes) “Seven Short Stories about Drones.” The initial tweet was the title. The next seven started with a famous line from a canonical work of literature followed by sentences that Cole might have penned but sound more like a newspaper report, personal account, or propaganda about drones. The first Twitter story is “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Pity. A signature strike leveled the florist’s.” The seventh is “Mother died today. The program saves American lives.” An eighth tweet provided a link to a ProPublica article about drone strikes. 

Other form constraints have nothing to do with length but are actual forms, or borrowed forms, as with Daniel Orzoco’s “The Orientation,” a story written in the form of an orientation to a business office. Or Susan Steinberg’s “Isla,” a numbered list of things a father says to her daughter as they sit in a restaurant, commands seemingly as innocent as “Never tuck the napkin,” even though the story is quite clearly about incest. Heidi Julavitz’s “Marry the One Who Gets There First: Outtakes from the Sheidegger-Krupnik Wedding Album” is organized as a series of photos. Julavitz describes a photograph in italics, then offers the real story of what occurred when the picture was taken. Apparently, Julavitz got the idea from reading a photo essay of images not usually included in wedding albums. Rather than narrating a fairytale wedding, her story is one of transgression, appalling behavior, deception, and lust. A wedding story with very cynical players whose somewhat repellant sexual overexperience is central to the tale. 

Los Angeles-based writer Diane Arieff responded to an assignment to write a story in an unfamiliar container with “God: User Reviews,” which opens:

Contact Information: Reachable via lamentation, group prayer, rhythmic chant, written appeal, liturgical recitation, meditative outreach, dance, selected hallucinogens and dark night of the soul.

Note: In some markets, DBA as Allah, Krishna, Christ, Nyame, Ein Sof, Shiva, Jehovah, Yahweh, Creator, Brahma, HaShem, Shakti, et al. For a complete list, visit our website: www.AllKnowing1.com

The story then offers God’s business description, service area (“infinite”), payment options (“PayPal,” “animal sacrifice”), and actual services, as well as how users rate his workmanship and responsiveness, etc. The piece ends with customer reviews. But unlike, say, the rather hilarious Hutzler 571 banana slicer reviews on Amazon—I recommend Googling this hilarious pop-up fiction effort disguised as reviews for the plastic gadget—Arieff’s story isn’t merely a joke. Though at first she says her intention was “merely comic” and that she simply wanted to satirize “various tropes of Internet commerce,” she worried her initial effort was self-indulgent, her ambition “shallow.” Why not go for something more? In the end, Arieff eliminated a webmaster character, who had originally been managing God’s brand by responding to negative comments, and she used “customer reviews” to explore some of her preoccupations, including how, she says, “So much passion, loneliness, anger, desire to be understood, and need to assert the importance of our lived experience gets unleashed on the internet, onto comment boards and Twitter and endless hyper-detailed and intense user reviews for every conceivable thing.” ¹⁵

In the end, the story offers beliefs about God that are funny, heartbreaking, or serious. The story’s penultimate paragraph is from a user who comments, 

Such unbearable foolishness. In Prague in 1941, my father and uncle were shot in the street during a Nazi police action. My mother, sister and I were deported to Theresienstadt, where my sister died of typhus. In 1943 my mother and I were sent to Auschwitz. They separated us when we got off the train and I never saw her again. I was 13 when the camp was liberated. I weighed 68 pounds. Other than a second cousin who lives in Israel, I am the only survivor in my family. My parents and sister, my grandparents, all my aunts, uncles and cousins were murdered. Our story is not unique. There are millions like it. I saw such unspeakable things there, things I won’t mention. After such a war, how obscene to talk about God. For better or worse, there is only us. Please do not offer here any claims about your ‘services.’ It is an insult to the memory of all those who perished with your name on their lips.~ Jacob Kleinfeld, White Plains, NY

At times, whole books are conceived with overarching principles that present intriguing constraints. Edward P. Jones has published two collections of fiction. Lost in the City came out in 1992, and All Aunt Hagar’s Children in 2006, far enough apart that a reader might notice that (say) all his stories take place in a Black community in Washington, DC, or that his protagonists age as he moves from story to story. In interviews, Jones says that, with the exception of one story, based loosely on his first day of school, he does not use autobiographical material in his fiction, though, he says, “all the places I write about are real.” ¹⁶ But that isn’t exactly a constraint. More how he approaches his material, the world he chooses to portray, and his organizational strategies. 

But Jones also matched the fourteen stories in his first collection with the fourteen in his second, so a minor character in the first story in the first collection is a major character in the first story in the second collection and so on throughout the fourteen stories. Occasionally, a major character in one story is a major character in the second volume. The effect is to give an even greater sense of what the individual stories give you: the richness of the world in which his characters live, the complexity of his characters’ lives, and the reminder of that most basic of truths: people who intersect your life for the briefest of moment are the stars of their own life stories and have their own compelling narratives. 

Jess Anthony’s 2020 novel Enter the Aardvark ping-pongs between two narratives, one that takes place at a taxidermist’s in Victorian England, and one that concerns a particularly obnoxious Republican senator during the Trump administration. The phrase “Enter the aardvark” popped into Anthony’s head in 2012, and then, before the 2016 election, she had the urge to write a political novel. The result is this curious novel. 

In a manner of speaking, a taxidermist gives something new life, and Anthony’s book is structured around ideas of rebirth, which recur throughout the book. At some point—and here comes a big spoiler—the reader realizes that the senator story is a retelling of the taxidermist’s story, as unlikely as that might seem, and elements of the taxidermist’s story intersect, drive, and eventually resolve the senator’s story. So, everything in the book is doubled, what happens in the past, happens in the present, and the aardvark in the taxidermist’s shop is also the one in a bedroom that the Republican senator visits. The story could not be more imaginative. One might assume the book was tightly conceived with an intricate outline whereby Anthony figured out how one thing was going to become another, where (essentially) she puzzled through her constraint. But that is not what happened. When she speaks about the novel, she talks about discovering her material as she went. 

Even authors uninterested in constrained writing have to contend with constraint. That constraint might be a work’s organization or the design. But in the end, the best writers don’t just tell their stories. They shape them.

Organization and design are not the same thing. Most writers know they need to organize their material—arrange scenes, choose what to do in summary and what in more dramatic form. They know they have to figure out how to handle time. But newer writers might think less about the sort of design that makes fiction seem truly artful. They think less about an overarching metaphor or a clear thematic concern or the imposed terms of their stories. Joan Silber has been writing books of short stories for the last decade or so, in which the stories connect in intriguing ways, characters or details from one story popping up in another. They also often take place in New York and Southeast Asia. Those choices (arguably constraints) have always fascinated me less than how each book uses its title. Fools is indeed about foolish people and how their lives intersect with social justice and injustice. Silber’s most recent book Secrets to Happiness concerns happiness, as it relates to economic justice and injustice. At a certain point, it seems silly to think of these choices as constraints, though. This is just artful design. Right?

So, some writerly advice: Even if the idea of assigning yourself a constraint does not particularly appeal, you might think about constrained writing. You might not write a sonnet, but your free verse has to be written to some sort of principle or idea of what your poem is going to be, and that’s its constraint. Your story might not be in the form of an SAT test or CD liner notes or the copy on the back of a cereal box, but ideally, it’s going to have some sort of shape, one that you may only discover in the process of writing. At some point, even if you don’t like homework, the material you are working with is going to give you an assignment. Your material is going to talk to you, and what it is going to say is “There’s something I want you to do.” 

Debra Spark has published eleven books. Her next novel, Discipline, will be published in 2024.