Some years ago I learned about a somewhat obscure French literary movement called Oulipo, that started maybe fifty years ago or so. The movement was oriented around works of literature that were arbitrarily constrained in some way or another. Probably the most famous such work was La Disparition, a 300-page novel written without the letter “e”. Pretty impressive!

Without quite knowing it I’ve been a fan of this movement for a long time. Almost instinctually, when I write fiction, I work to constrain it in somewhat arbitrary fashion. I can never quite explain why that is, it just tends to strike my fancy and I go with it.

In my most recent short story, The Game, I’ve practiced that in a few different ways.

To begin with, the main character is ungendered. Some people have read the character as a guy, I think assuming that the story is meant to be autobiographical. It’s not meant to be, though I can certainly understand that reading. From the start I was fairly careful to avoid any explicit indication of the main character’s gender, though when I set out I couldn’t have said precisely why. By way of post-hoc rationalization - I think giving the main character a gender simply didn’t seem important to the story. It also creates an odd similarity between the main character and the smartphone (which is of course un-gendered as well.) I like the idea of creating that kind of ambiguity, and that is to some degree the point of the story - that the smart phone becomes an extension of the main character’s personality, rather than a separate intelligent being in its own right.

I was also careful to leave the word “chess” out of the first part of the story, even though of course the whole thing is about chess. In this case I did not set out with that intention, I just came across that idea after I had drafted part 2. In large part I like this removal because it leaves the game un-named. One of the most important goals of this story is to explore the way that choosing and applying names is a significant act of abstraction; it’s a uniquely human skill. Creating some tension around naming enhances the meaning of the work. At least I like to think so.

These kind of constraints shape the relationship between the writer and the reader, it seems to me. In holding something back, and making the story somewhat less-specified than it might have been, the writer creates some space inside the narrative. That allows the read to fill in the blanks however she sees fit - or perhaps to leave the blanks unfilled altogether. The final experience, I hope, is that much more engaging and exciting!