Fun for Friday: Writing without a Letter
Not too long ago, I mentioned pangrams, which are sentences that use every letter in the English language. But what about NOT using a specific letter in a story, or even a novel?
It’s called a lipogram, it’s most commonly done with the letter “E,” which seems really difficult! My last sentence had 8 instances of that letter. But it can be done!
For examples, check out “Th Fifth Lttr” by S. Qiouyi Lu at Daily Science Fiction, Gadsby by Ernest Vincent Wright, and La Disparition by Georges Perec (translated into English as The Void, still as a lipogrammatic novel, and similarly translated into other languages within the same constraints).
While I won’t be trying for a lipogrammatic story anytime soon, it could be fun to try some sentences in this style. And while it might be easy to exclude things like “Q” or “Z,” trying with more common letters can make it much more challenging!
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