[stylist] concise

Wed Jan 12 04:11:15 UTC 2011

Here is some information about works written without certain letters:

Gadsby: Champion of Youth    
Author 
Ernest Vincent Wright  
Country 
United States  
Language 
English  
Genre(s) 
Novel
, lipogram omitting the letter e  
Publisher 
Wetzel Publishing Co.  
Publication date 
1939  
Media type 
Print (
Hardback)  
Pages 
260 pp  
ISBN 
NA  
OCLC 
57759048 
table end

Gadsby: Champion of Youth is a 1939 novel by 
Ernest Vincent Wright
 that tells the story of the fictitious city Branton Hills. The book
primarily deals with the transformation, through youth's vigor, of a
moribund and slothful
community. Protagonist John Gadsby, a man about fifty years old, calls upon
the youth of Branton Hills to aid him in bringing activity and vitality back
to the town.

This 50,110-word story is most famous as a notably ambitious 
lipogram
: it painstakingly omits the letter E from its text. It is an inspiration to
similar vanguard authors; books such as 
A Void
 follow in its tracks.

Look up 
lipogram
 in 
Wiktionary
, the free dictionary.

A lipogram (from 
Greek 
lipagrammatos, "missing letter") is a kind of 
constrained writing
 or 
word game
 consisting of writing paragraphs or longer works in which a particular
letter or group of letters is missing, usually a common vowel, the most
common in

English
 being 
e 
[1]
. A lipogram author avoiding e then only uses the 25 remaining letters of
the alphabet.

Writing a lipogram is a trivial task for uncommon letters like 
Z, 
J
, or 
X
, but it is much more difficult for common letters like 
E, 
T
 or 
A
. Writing this way, the author must omit many ordinary words, often
resulting in stilted-sounding text that can be difficult to understand.
Well-written
lipograms are rare, providing a challenge to writers.

. Examples of lipograms include the above example, 
Ernest Vincent Wright
's 
Gadsby
 (1939), and 
Georges Perec
's novel 
A Void
 (La Disparition) (1969), both of which are missing the letter 
E
 (the most common letter in both 
French
 and 
English
). Perec was one of a group of French authors called 
Oulipo
 who adopted a variety of constraints in their work. Gilbert Adair's English
translation of La Disparition, titled A Void, stayed faithful to the spirit
of the French original by not using the letter E either, thereby restricting
the writer from employing such common English words as the and me. A Spanish
translation instead omits the letter 
A
, as that is the most common letter in Spanish. Perec subsequently wrote Les
revenentes (1972), a novel that uses no vowels except for E. 
list end
list of 1 items
. Other writers have reworked previous works into lipograms; for example, 
Gyles Brandreth
 re-wrote some of Shakespeare's works: 
Hamlet
 without the letter "I" redoing the oft-quoted soliloquy "To be or not to
be, that's the query"; 
Macbeth
 without "A" or "E"; 
Twelfth Night
 without "O" or "L"; 
Othello
 without "O".
[2] 
list end

Bill Meeker

"If you stuff dead hamsters in your mouth, they won't smell liquor on your
breath."
--Dr. Raymond X.L. Crotchford, 1974 closing argument; State of Michigan
first malpractice hearing

-----Original Message-----
From: stylist-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:stylist-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of loristay at aol.com
Sent: Tuesday, January 11, 2011 8:47 PM
To: stylist at nfbnet.org
Subject: Re: [stylist] concise

I had a challenge once to write a story without the letter 'e.'  Fun.
try it.
Lori

-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Kuell <ckuell at comcast.net>
To: Writer's Division Mailing List <stylist at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Tue, Jan 11, 2011 9:10 pm
Subject: [stylist] concise

I belong to a writing group in WV, and a few years ago we had a prompt to
write a 55 word story--no more, no less. The goal was to be selective and
concise with our words. Here's what I came up with:

Between Us Friends

I went down to Kelsey's Pub with my best friend last night. After a few
beers, I told him I thought my wife was having an affair. 

He looked shocked, and responded, "You sure?"

I nodded in affirmation.

"If I was you, I'd kill the bastard." 

So, I pulled out my gloc and shot him. 

--chris

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