One special group of alphabet heroes are the French writer, Raymond Queneau, and his friends who in 1960 set up ‘Oulipo’ which stands for ‘Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle’ or ‘Workshop for Potential Literature’. They wanted to find out how literature works by imposing constraints on what could or could not be written. So, a ‘pangram’ is the constraint of trying to write a sentence using all the letters of the alphabet. An acrostic is the constraint of trying to write a poem by using the letters of a word as the initial letters of lines of a poem. Oulipo weren’t the first to try this but they took it much further than anyone had before. Oulipo procedures produce writing from the source of language’s formal structures: its phonetics, alphabet, grammar, literary conventions and the like. The end product is often both surprising and surreal.
Here is a series of twenty games which engage with how letters and the alphabet work. These can all be simplified or made harder depending on the age or experience of the players.
1. ALPHABETICAL AFRICA
In 1974, Walter Abish (who wasn’t actually a member of the Oulipo group) published a novel called Alphabetical Africa in which each chapter contained only words which began with a single letter of the alphabet. There were fifty-two chapters, so in the first chapter all the words began with ‘a’, the second with ‘b’, the third with ‘c’ until it reached ‘z’. Then, the chapters ran in reverse back through the alphabet to ‘a’.
As a challenge, try writing a story of fifty-two sentences, each of which follow the same principle and patterns of Alphabetical Africa: one sentence, one and the same initial letter for each word. The sentences can be as short or as long as you like. A dictionary by your side will of course be a great help.
2. PANGRAM AND ISOPANGRAM
This rising challenge works like this:
i) Pangram
Write the shortest possible sentence using all the letters of the alphabet. You are permitted to repeat letters. Can you beat, ‘A quick, brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’? If not, what’s the shortest pangram you can write not using the main words in that sentence?
ii) Isopangram
Write a sentence that is twenty-six letters long in which you use all the letters of the alphabet. In other words, you can use a letter only once. This is probably impossible, so the challenge is to get as near to this ideal as possible.
3. BELLE PRÉSENTE AND BELLE ABSENTE
i) Belle Présente
Write a poem or letter in which the only letters you may use are the ones in the name of the person you are writing to.
Write a poem or letter in which you may use any letters other than the letters of the name of the person you are writing to.
You can turn either of these into a challenge to a reader to see if he or she can find out who it is the poem or letter is addressed to.
4. N + 7
Take any passage from literature, a proverb or idiom. Locate the noun or nouns in the text you have chosen. Look up the noun or nouns in a dictionary. Find the noun that is seven nouns later in the dictionary. Replace the noun or nouns in your text with the one or ones you have found in the dictionary. This produces such sentences as ‘To be or not to be, that is the quibble’.
5. ABC WRITING
You may use only a sequence of words whose initial letters are in alphabetical order. (You can, if you want, not count ‘a’, ‘an’, ‘the’ or prepositions like ‘to’, ‘from’ or ‘with’ as words in the sequence.) You can try this in terms of lines of a poem, a tweet, or lines of dialogue in a sketch or play. To make it harder, one person starts and the next person has to pick up the alphabetic order of words where the first person leaves off, until you reach ‘z’ and start again from ‘a’.
You might begin: ‘The Android broke the cup on David’s elbow . . .’
6. DELMAS’S METHOD
You produce a phrase or sentence in which several words begin with the same letter. Then you re-write that phrase or sentence replacing that letter with a different single letter. For example: ‘Make the meal in a master class’. Replace the ‘m’ with ‘t’ and you get ‘Take the teal in a taster class’.
7. THE EXETER TEXT
Oulipo maître Georges Perec famously wrote a novel in which the only vowel he used was ‘e’. He then wrote another in which he banned himself from using ‘e’. In ‘the Exeter text’ you follow the first of these constraints, using only words with the ‘e’ vowel. The test for this game will be to write the longest passage with this constraint in place in a given length of time, let’s say, five minutes. You can of course then try ‘the anti-Exeter text’, where the ‘e’ is banned.
8. EYE-RHYME
Here you have to write a limerick or a four-line verse in which the words that would normally rhyme must only look as if they would rhyme, but in fact don’t. These are words like ‘threat’ and ‘eat’, or ‘south’ and ‘youth’, or ‘was’ and ‘has’ and so on.
9. HOMOCONSONANTISM
Pick a text, e.g. a proverb or famous quotation or newspaper headline. Remove all the vowels. Fill the letters you have left over with any vowels whilst keeping the consonants in the same order and using only those consonants. The result must make some kind of sense!
So, ‘Many hands make light work’ would give you:
m, n, h, n, d, s, m, k, l, g, h, t, w, r, k
which you could turn into:
‘Me? No. He needs my keel. Go, hot, wee Rik!’
10. LEFT-HANDED AND RIGHT-HANDED LIPOGRAM CONVERSATIONS
This is for touch-typists only. The left-handed text can be constructed using only the letters you tap with your left hand. The right-handed text can be constructed using only the letters you tap with your right hand. The challenge is to turn this into a conversation between the two hands.
11. PRISONER’S CONSTRAINT
A prisoner is so short of paper he must maximize his use of it. He decides to not use any letter which extends above or below the smallest letters. This excludes: ‘b’, ‘d’, ‘f’, ‘g’, ‘h’, ‘j’, ‘k’, ‘l’, ‘p’, ‘q’, ‘t’ and ‘y’. He (i.e. you!) now has to write poems or letters to his loved ones, or letters to his fellow criminals with messages about plans to escape or rob a bank.
12. MEMORY-JOGGING ALPHABET
You have forgotten the alphabet, so you need a way of remembering it. So, you create words with each letter which will enable you to remember it. These must include the sound of the letter-name in each word. You can run the letter-names of two or more letters into one word, if you like. You’re allowed to cheat. Here’s a start:
If it’s too hard to do the whole lot, make up phrases for sequences of any part of the alphabet.
Another layer of this challenge is to come up with a clue for the sequence you’ve invented and ask someone to guess which part of the alphabet you’re talking about. So the clue for the one above might be: ‘A biblical figure, known by his nickname, is asked if he can see the statue.’
13. WORD LADDER STORIES
Many quiz and puzzle books invite puzzlers to turn a word like ‘head’ into ‘tail’ in as short a possible time by removing one letter at a time, while retaining real words. Lewis Carroll called these doublets.
HEAD
HEAL
TEAL
TELL
TALL
TAIL
So, (1) solve a ‘doublet’ challenge set by one of these puzzle books and then (2) use these words to make a story or, better still, a short poem. You don’t have to tell the story using the words in the same order that they appear in the ‘doublet’.
You can turn this into a challenge by inviting the reader of your story to guess the correct sequence of the ‘doublet’.
Some words are the same whichever way you write them: ‘pip’, or the name ‘Hannah’. Some words are mirror images of each other: ‘star’ and ‘rats’. You can also make phrases and sentences which read the same way in reverse. The most successful is perhaps:
‘A man, a plan, a canal – Panama.’
The challenge is to make up a palindrome phrase or sentence – short or long – that makes sense.
15. NORDEN AND MUIR
Denis Norden and Frank Muir used to play a game on the Home Service (now BBC Radio 4) in which they took a well-known phrase, saying or proverb and twisted it to mean something else whilst still retaining much of its original sound. ‘Yon solitary Highland Lass’ became ‘One solitary nylon lash’.
Having distorted the original phrase, the trick is to make up the story which leads up to this new phrase being its last line. You can play it by having a book of quotations and proverbs to hand, and one player challenges another with the well-known phrase which the challenged player must then change and invent a story to fit it.
16. SNOWBALL
Your text starts off with a one-letter word and continues by adding one letter at a time:
am
the
fool
whose
mother
accuses
generals
viciously . . .
. . . and so on.
17. THE MELTING SNOWBALL
This is the opposite of the snowball – it starts long and ends up with a one-letter word, though you could get away with a one-digit number for this last spot!
18. ANCIENT HEBREW ENGLISH
Ancient Hebrew was written with no vowel letters. Ancient Hebrew English is a procedure which requires you to write notes to one another with no vowels (including ‘vowel y’ as in ‘rhythm’ or ‘lovely’) in order to investigate if we need vowels or not.
19. THE NEW VENTRILOQUIST
When the new ventriloquist starts to speak for his dummy ‘Charlie’ he tries to say words that include letters that make his lips move, but everyone can see straightaway that he is speaking. He decides to avoid all words with letters that require lip movements: ‘b’, ‘f’, ‘m’, ‘n’, ‘p’, ‘v’ and ‘w’.
This Oulipo procedure requires two people, one to play the ventriloquist speaking as himself, the other to play the ventriloquist’s dummy. The dummy must not say words which include the letters ‘b’, ‘f’, ‘m’, ‘n’, ‘p’, ‘v’ or ‘w’. The person playing the ventriloquist can try to trick the dummy into saying these words. Set a time limit, then swap over.
20. ALPHABET ELIMINATION
You write out the alphabet. Then, you take it in turns to (a) remove a letter from the alphabet and (b) spell a word that would have normally used that letter.
This new spelling must be convincing enough to make the word sound more or less the same. Also (c) once a letter has been removed, you can’t use it to spell a word.
So, the first player might eliminate ‘B’ and spell ‘thumb’ as ‘thumm’.
Cross ‘B’ off the alphabet.
The second player might eliminate ‘C’ and spell ‘ceiling’ as ‘seeling’ . . .
Cross ‘C’ off the alphabet.
And so on . . .
Last one standing, wins.