Have you ever heard of "Ouvroir de littérature potentielle" (Workshop of Potential Literature), more commonly known as Oulipo (or OuLiPo)?
Behind this rather strange name lies one of the most playful creative methods!
It began as a literary research group founded in 1960 by mathematician François le Lyonnais and writer and poet Raymond Queneau.
Its goal is to discover new forms of language and writing, modernizing expression through writing games.
For example, rather than limiting themselves to a five-act tragedy, or the rule of three unities in theater (time, place, and action), Oulipo offers authors new forms of writing.
The group is famous for its mathematical challenges imposed on language, forcing creative tricks.
To do this, Oulipo is based on the principle that constraint encourages the search for original solutions.
Forcing us to outwit habits to achieve novelty.
Thus, the founding members liked to describe themselves as "rats who build the labyrinth from which they intend to escape."
The approach I propose to you today is to apply some of its principles to our magical art!
Technique 1: Cut down the script.
For example, one of the Oulipo group's challenges was to "cut Stéphane Mallarmé's alexandrines to keep only the rhyming part (the end of the verse): this exercise first has the power to more simply reveal the meaning of a poem, somewhat like a Japanese haiku (a very short Japanese poem, expressing a feeling, an impression in three lines)."
It is thus possible to "cut" a trick's text, a title, to take it elsewhere.
Why not cut a trick to remove its usual ending, or on the contrary extend it by inventing a sequel?
Technique 2: The intersective trick
This consists of mixing two novels by telescoping their common points (type of character, situation, or twist).
Why not take two tricks that have absolutely nothing to do with each other and telescope their titles, or their effects, or the objects they use, to create the effect of one with the text of the other?
For example, performing the Indian Cabinet or an escapology act with a deck of cards and its case, or with coins and an Okito box?
A shell game with compact discs?
Technique 3: Deprivation
To write by forbidding oneself a practice (e.g., not using adjectives, not using a certain object, not speaking, not being able to see, not touching the object, etc.)
Undoubtedly the most striking example of this principle is Georges Perec's novel "A Void" ("La disparition"), which consists of writing a novel of over 300 pages without once using the most frequent letter in our language, the "e": a stylistic feat that marked literature!
To write "A Void," Georges Perec had to find a method to generate creativity.
In 1969, Georges Perec, in a televised interview (the "Actualité littéraire" program), confided: "If, instead of 26 letters, we only have 25, a real catastrophe will occur, especially if the letter we choose is an important one." Far from being a catastrophe, his novel ultimately proved incredibly invigorating.
So how did he go about it? To find out, one must leaf through the preparatory file of his work. One sees, without apparent order, illustrations on the theme of "e", typed pages, scribbled sheets. As Perec involved other authors, one also finds correspondence in which an "e" is spotted here and there and circled in red. Despite a messy appearance, he had a clear method, which consisted of drawing up lists of words without "e" according to a classification he decided: words beginning with "k", words ending with "d", verbs, proper nouns...
He thus brought back into fashion forgotten or little-used words and created a flourishing language, through wordplay, for example.
This way of proceeding made his task easier: "The book came out on its own," explained Perec in 1969. "There was a kind of automatization of writing."
How to use this method in our magic? Here are a few examples that could give you some ideas: doing a card trick without cards, doing a coin trick with cards, doing a trick without speaking, or without an audience. And you, what could you remove from your next trick to make it stand out?
Technique 4: The opposite
Why not look for the "opposite" of an existing effect (not finding a chosen card, finding 51 cards except the right one, an ambitious card that only goes down to the bottom of the deck, "levitating downwards" (thus justifying a black hole or a disappearance), starting a trick from the end (finding a card that has not yet been chosen)...
Technique 5: Playing with language
The choice is vast: invent a language that doesn't exist, speak only in the future tense, express yourself in a foreign language or in "Franglais," announce in advance what will happen à la Bertold Brecht, write in the form of an abecedary, use words by associating them with their opposites, use anagrams or homophones, speak only by quoting famous brands or advertising slogans, replay the same effect in different ways (comical, dramatic, tragic, mysterious, ironic, vulgar, etc.) in the manner of a Cyrano de Bergerac in his famous nose tirade!
Technique 6: My favorite, finding your own constraints!
To help you, you can also visit the official Oulipo movement website, which has created an illustrated dictionary of examples of the most emblematic constraints.
In short, constraint becomes a game, a springboard, an open door to a universe that does not yet exist but comes to life the moment the constraint imposes itself on us!
More than a creative technique: a philosophy of life!
