The deck my partner and I have at home is the updated 2001 edition, with a bizarre product description: “These cards evolved from separate observations of the principles underlying what we were doing. These prompts are meant to assist with removing blocks, but the Zen-like aphorisms are more abstract than prescriptive (i.e., “Start at the end,” or “Emphasize the flaws,” or really strange ones like “Remember a time when you hid from something as a child.”) Originally created in 1975 by painter Peter Schmidt and Brian Eno-yes, that Brian Eno, immensely talented musician, producer, and co-conspirator of the late David Bowie-each card has a single directive printed on it, a “strategy” for your creative process. When I’m writing I sometimes consult this strange little deck of cards called Oblique Strategies. There was another professor who forbade us from using adverbs, or giving characters first names, or starting any sentence with a pronoun-I loved his bizarre rules, even when I decided to break them. He usually puts most of them back, but something about the extraction lets him see the work differently. A friend of mine takes the articles out of any story or chapter that’s giving him problems. There was the professor who encouraged his classes to narrate problematic scenes from the perspective of inanimate objects, animals, or the dead. The weirdest approaches to process are the ones I find most helpful-the ones that have stayed with me the longest. Now, more than ten years later, if something isn’t working in a story or chapter, I sometimes fall back on the one-syllable trick.
Later, when I was revising, I found that because the work didn’t sound like me, I could brutally edit it. My professor stressed that this was a starting point, something to unlock us there was no need to stick to these rules in subsequent drafts. In my story, instead of an electrician playing checkers, “the lights guy played reds and blacks.” The formal constraint forced us to go beyond the easy, obvious choices. One student had something like “he who taught us of the past” to stand in for history professor.
The sentences were strange and clipped, everyday phrases made fascinating. Every single student had done something striking and compelling. When we came back to class and read our stories aloud, it was a revelation. At first this sounded awful-how could we possibly pull this off? It wasn’t easy, but very quickly it became a kind of game to me, an obstruction that brought out odd new rhythms. When I was getting my MFA in fiction, one of my favorite professors asked us to write a story using only single syllable words. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.
37 in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing.