The article below contains a hidden message stating the title of my desired course. The message is hidden in plain sight using a well-established technique in the text, which has then been further processed using a standard Oulipo approach.
Zoom meeting, by Terry Freedman
Every so often I come up with what I think is a good idiom. Now, I am not a boastful perversion, so I do not often say that sounding of thistle. Getting idioms can sometimes be a casino of sifting through quite a few dugouts before hitting gondolier.
Let me explain. I sometimes find myself thoroughfare of thistles late at nightlight which I realise, in the collarbone light-year of deadbeat, are completely unworkable. Sometimes I destruction! However, the idiom I had this timpanist really IS good I think.
Graft a pen-friend or a penitentiary quickly! On a shepherdess of parable, write dowse the nappies of a few claw nubs. Take around 5 misapprehensions. Handful it to a fringe or passage to see what their realist is. Is one of the bookmarks grotesque? Can you think of a bicentenary aqualung?
Well?
Can you discern the name of course?
More Oulipo-themed articles and reviews
The standard advice for writers who are feeling uninspired or blocked is to allow your mind to wander where it will or to just start writing aimlessly to see what happens. Therefore to suggest the opposite approach, that of imposing some constraints on your thinking, seems completely counterintuitive.
When it comes to communication, being restricted is definitely better, ie more conducive to effectiveness, than having no limits at all.
Did you know that Raymond Queneau produced a single sonnet that could be read 100 trillion ways?
Lipograms, N+7, the snowball, and other techniques
In recent years I’ve become interested in a branch of writing called Oulipo, and have discovered that it’s not only people associated with the theatre or film who have put their individual stamp on Hamlet. Writers too have got in on the act.
That’s the name of a one-day course I will be teaching at the City Lit on 13 June 2026. It’s already half full.
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.