Georges Perec's A Void was originally written in French (as La Disparition). It completely avoided using the letter "e". As you know, the letter "e" is the most common letter in the English alphabet. Without it you can't use "the", "he", "she", "love", or about three quarters of the words in English. Since French uses even more e's, I am told that that constraint excluded seven eighths of all French words from being used in the composition. The translation that was subsequently made in to English managed to keep the same constraint.

Perec did all sorts of other interesting constrained writing experiments, many in conjunction with Oulipo (a group that included Italo Calvino), who were also particularly interested in constrained writing. One of their other members, Raymond Queneau created a work called 100,000,000,000,000 Sonnets, which "consisted of ten pages of 14 lines, cut into strips so that one could lift a strip and make up to 10^14 combinations, thus the title. If you attempted to read all the sonnets contained, it would take 190,258,751 years until you finished it."

"You see symbols were made to be doorways. You don’t stop at a symbol and say, here, this is an equal armed cross with a circle around it. You're supposed to go through that symbol and find out what’s behind it... for me, a symbol is just a beginning. To what is behind the symbol. It is not just a pretty decorative pattern. You take it and you chew it... You take it apart. You look at it, and can use any one of a dozen ways... Look at it, wait and see if another symbol comes up, add that to the first one. Wait and see if another one comes up. When you’ve finished all that lot, kind of sit and look at the symbol... you make a friend of your symbol. And you give it a name. ‘Hi Fred! How are you doing?’ And the symbol sits there and says, ‘I’m doing O.K. What would you like to know today?’ ‘Well listen Fred, I’ve been thinking. You know, you’re always drawn in this way, can you give me an aspect of yourself that was before this?' ‘Well, let me think.’ says Fred, ‘I used to be drawn like this...’ --An Interview with Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki

"Suffering is the fastest horse that leads to perfection" --Meister Eckhart