W is for ... WORD LADDER

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So today is the 26th of April, which must mean that it's the twenty-third day of the A to Z challenge.  I've decided to share my love of writing through this challenge, and hopefully introduce people to the world of Oulipo.  I first heard about Oulipo when I was at university, and I was fascinated by their approach to writing that I decided to delve deeper into the world of experimental writing.

In a nutshell, this group of writers likes to assign constraints to their work in order to push creative boundaries.  Not only is this fun to do (the process of writing something with a constraint really does open the mind), the results are brilliant.  If nothing else, it gets your brain box working, and that's a good thing, surely!



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W is for WORD LADDER

"Called doublets by Lewis Carroll (one of its independent inventors), a game in which a word is transformed into another by changing one of its letters at a time from a series of intermediary words.  The first and last words are usually opposites, like dawn and dusk." 

Oulipo Compendium ed. Harry Matthews & Alastiar Brotchie (London: Atlas Press, 2005) page 245.

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So, I gave this a go.  It wasn't as easy as I thought it would be, and I did consider cheating and looking for some on the internet (tut tut me).  But I didn't.  I did these all from my little brain box.  If there are any mistakes, let me know.  Or if you can do them in fewer moves, let me know.

White/Black

white

while

whale

shale

stale

stalk

stack

slack

black

Old/New

old

odd

add

aid

mid

mod

nod

now

new

Dog/Cat

dog

dot

cot

cat

Hand/Foot

hand

land

lane

line

lint

mint

mind

mild

wild

wile

wife

rife

rift

riot

root

foot

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I guess you could take this one step further and use these words in a half-rhyme poem.