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”:

Now here’s an extract from one of the rewrites:

Here’s an extract from a version called “Official Letter”:

And here’s one more:

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.