Anyone interested in the craft of writing should read this book. It’s not a primer, or dictionary, or anything of that nature. But it does exactly what it says on the tin. (If you’re not sure of the significance of that phrase, watch the advert below.)
The author is Raymond Queneau, one of the founders of the French writing movement called the Oulipo, which roughly translates as “workshop of potential literature”. What he did was write a simple story in which there’s a bit of an altercation between two people on a bus, an observation about the person’s dress, and the sighting of one of the people a little later in the day. That’s it: hardly a story. Hardly even an anecdote.
But what Queneau then does is to rewrite the story in numerous ways. For example, this is part of the “vanilla” story, what Queneau calls “Notation”:
“Notation
On the S bus, in the rush hour. A chap of about twenty six, soft hat with a cord instead of a ribbon, neck too long, as if someone’s been tugging at it. People getting off. ”
Now here’s an extract from one of the rewrites:
“Metaphorically
At the very heart of the day, tossed among the shoal of travelling sardines in a white-bellied beetle, a chicken with a long, featherless neck suddenly harangued one of their number, a peace-abiding one, and its parlance, moist with protest, was unleashed into the air. ”
Here’s an extract from a version called “Official Letter”:
“Official Letter
I beg to advise you of the following facts of which I happened to be the equally impartial and horrified witness.
Today, at roughly twelve noon, I was present on the platform of a bus which was proceeding up the rue de Courcelles in the direction of the Place Champerret. The aforementioned bus was fully laden- more than fully laden, I might even venture to say, since the conductor had accepted an overload of several candidates, without valid reason and actuated by an exaggerated kindness of heart which caused him to exceed the regulations and which, consequently, bordered on indulgence. ”
And here’s one more:
“Mathematical
In a rectangular parallepiped moving along a line representing an integral solution of the second-order differential equation:
y”+PPTB(x)y’ +S=84
two homoids (of which only one, the homoid A, manifests a cylindrical element of length L>N encircled by two sine waves of ...”
Not all of the “styles” work very well for me. For example, the dog Latin one does nothing for me. But most of them are instructive as well as humorous. It’s fascinating to see, for instance, what a difference it makes to the “feeling” of a piece of writing if it uses only the passive tense, or is rendered as an official report.
This book inspired me to write my own version of this sort of thing, which I’ve called experiments in style. I’ve learnt quite a lot from that endeavour, and I hope people who read those blog posts find them useful — and entertaining — as well.
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