★ Writing With Unnatural Constraints
It’s sophistry to argue that one can write within a constraint without the constraint affecting the quality of the writing.
Marcin Wichary, writing at Unsung, explores a rather astonishing FAQ for the game Super Metroid written in the late 1990s by "rs1n". The FAQ is over 17,000 words long and fully justified when viewed with a monospaced font, without using any trickery with extra spaces or hyphenation. The author notes that the program used to justify the text was none, and it was all done with an ASCII editor.
Wichary finds the FAQ to be a curiosity and praises rs1n for trying something very difficult and pulling it off with aplomb. He also mentions that many other FAQs and documents from the plain-text era also used full-justification, but rs1n's FAQ achieves the effect without trickery, making it look natural and not calling attention to itself.
However, the FAQ still feels stilted, as though written by someone for whom English is their second language. Wichary compares this to lipograms, which are "writing paragraphs or longer works in which a particular letter or group of letters is avoided". He cites the example of Ernest Vincent Wright, who published an entire novel, Gadsby, in 1939, without using the letter 'e'.
While Wright was a fine writer, Gadsby is miserable to read due to its constrained word choices, which bring to mind the challenge of fitting words into a constraint, even if it results in less natural-sounding prose. Wichary concludes by stating that while it's possible to write within a constraint without the constraint affecting the quality of the writing, it's sophistry to argue otherwise.
Written by urgent.news from Daring Fireball's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
