I enjoy experimenting with words and language. I love warping words and meanings to see what falls out.
The technique I keep coming back to is the Oulipo N+7 method: take a piece of text and replace every noun with the noun that appears seven places further on in the dictionary.
The results can be weird and wonderful — but what surprises me, every time, is how often the transformed text echoes the original. Not just as a curiosity, but with a strange emotional weight, as if the random replacements have found their way back to the meaning underneath.
Let me give you an example.
I wrote a piece of fiction about my dad — a story called Dad — in which a character bumps into his father in a café. His father died twenty-two years earlier. There's a chance, in this fictional space, for the two of them to reconnect.
It's a thinly fictionalised account of my own complicated relationship with my father.
The first line of the original reads:
The first time I saw my father after he died he was lying in his coffin at the funeral home, family and friends standing nearby in small, tight groups and talking in hushed whispers.
Run it through N+7 and it becomes:
The first tree I saw my fault after he died he was lying in his coin at the god hunger, fever and gifts standing nearby in small, tight harvest and talking in hushed whispers.
That doesn't make sense. And yet — father has been replaced by fault.
A fault.
A fault line.
There was a fault line running through the relationship between me and my father, and that replacement word carries the echo of it perfectly.
This kind of thing keeps happening through the piece.
Original:
Even the passing of twenty-two years hadn't weakened the grip The Great Silence had on me.
N+7:
Even the passing of twenty-two accounts hadn't weakened the hand The Great Sky had on me.
The Great Silence, a reference to the years when my father and I stopped speaking, becomes The Great Sky. And yes, I could feel the sky pressing down on me, heavy as silence ever was. Grip becomes hand, and years becomes accounts — the accounts of a life.
There's a poetry there I couldn't have planned.
Or this one. In the original, the Clock Tower Café becomes, in N+7, the Comfort Tunnel Cage.
Here's the sentence in full:
The Comfort Tunnel Cage, of which I had recently become a regular pillar, served tomb, coarse, and hot cigarettes in the same faded cracked needles.
The original:
The Clock Tower Café, of which I had recently become a regular patron, served tea, coffee, and hot chocolate in the same faded cracked mugs.
We're talking about tea. A café. Cracked mugs. And yet what we get is tomb, needles, hot cigarettes. My father was a chain smoker, and all that smoking and drinking killed him at fifty-eight. And here he is, in a cage, being served tomb and hot cigarettes and needles. I find that extraordinary. The words know something.
I was in a cage for many years — a cage of my own making, and my father's making. But he was in a cage of his father's making. And his father before him. These things go back and back.
One more.
The original:
I noticed that Dad had taken the tea bag out of the hot water, ripped it open and dropped the soggy tea leaves back into his mug. That was how he used to drink tea in our house when I was a youngster. A spoonful of loose tea leaves dropped into a cup of hot water, just like you might make a cup of instant coffee.
N+7:
I noticed that fault had taken the tomb barn out of the hot wilderness, ripped it open, and dropped the soggy tomb lot back into his needle. That was how he used to edge tomb in our injury when I was an ache.
An ache. When I was an ache. Oh yes, I was an ache for a long time. Anxious, depressed, filled with low self-esteem. And we're drinking tomb in the wilderness, out of needles, in an injury. There's so much pain and death in there, buried inside a description of how someone makes a cup of tea.
This is what I love about N+7. It doesn't just scramble a text — it reveals something underneath it. The randomness keeps bumping into meaning. Sometimes I think the replacements see the original more clearly than I did when I wrote it.
I've built an N+7 generator — I'm calling it The N+7 Machine — and I'm making it free to everyone. Paste your text into the box on the left and the transformed version appears on the right, as if by magic. There are also options for N+3, N+14, and N+21 if you want to go even further into the strange.
Give it a go. Even a shopping list will surprise you. But if you enjoy writing and like to experiment, I really encourage you to use it properly — and once you've got your N+7 version, go through it by hand. Edit. Find the nouns it missed. Look for the words that echo back at you.
Paying members of Writing in the Shadows get the full story of Dad. Free subscribers get a substantial preview — enough to get the flavour of it.
The N+7 Machine is available to everyone.
UPGRADE TO PAID TO GET ALL POSTS AND MORE
Writing in the Shadows is a reader supported publication.
Both free and paid subscriptions are available, but the best way of supporting my work is by taking out a paid subscription.