In Which I Contemplate Accomplishing a Literary Stunt that No One, to My Knowledge, Has Even Attempted Before (Or: "Bits," an Example of a Genuinely Insane Form of "Constrained Writing.")

My friend Jeffrey Pomerantz calls the literary something or other I created a "xanolex," which apparently means "to lose words." A friend of Jeff's a poet named Paul Jones, said that the correct term for it is a "thanatolex."

Whatever you call it, I did it, so if one of those words becomes an official word in the English language, well, maybe I'll get into the Oxford English Dictionary yet.

What I did was write a story of about 1,100 words that didn't repeat a single word. It is a science fiction story called "Bits," and you can find it on my website. Just click on this paragraph, and you'll get to it.

I'm not in the habit of bragging, but now is one of those times where I'm going to do so.

I am impressed with myself.

Think about it. The. And. By. For. But. To. This. That. You. Me. He. She. Him. Her. The. In. Out. Who. What. When. Where. Why. How. A. I. Those. These. Which. Said. Once. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

Imagine writing more than four double-spaced pages and not being able to use any of these words twice.

And now imagine, as you go through it, that you find a place where you used the same word twice. Maybe you used the word "gesture" more than once. So you change one of those "gesture"s to "hand signal."

But you can't, because you've already used "hand" someplace before. So you change "hand" to "signal with fingers."

But you can't do that, because you used "with" somewhere else. So you change it to "finger signal."

But then you find out that you used the word "fingers" already.

You get the idea.

(And yes, I practically wore out the "Find" function on my word processor, hunting for multiple occurrences of the same word. And yes, I had to call the thing a "narrative processing program" in my story, because, of course, I needed to use "word" at the beginning.)

Ultimately, I blame my friend Tom Harrington for this.

Tom is a friend of mine from back in the day at UMASS. He is one of those people I have not seen in years who I still call a best friend. He's that kind of guy.

Tom has an identical twin brother, Bill. I would not know Bill if it were not were Tom, and Bill really was the one who started all this.

Yes, my friend Jeff was really the one who read Bill's comment on one of my Facebook posts and thought to himself "hmmm....what could I do to reduce my friend Derek to insane, whimpering ball of retentiveness?" But Jeff would not have done this had Bill not posted the Facebook comment that inspired Jeff to lay down his challenge, the challenge that, surprisingly, did not result in a nervous breakdown.

(Another friend of mine, my karate sensei Mike Katayanagi--who is an extremely detail oriented guy--said that he almost lost his mind simply reading it and hunting for a multiple word use.)

It began so innocently. Last Monday--March 18th, to be exact--I was proud of myself. I'd cranked out a couple of hundred words of my next book, and had passed the 12,000 word mark (12,189, to be exact). I was proud.

So I posted my word count on Facebook:

Derek Leif

March 18

Word count: 12,189.

I've been doing that as a sort of spur to keep writing. Every day that I work on the book I post the word count so that now if I slack it's going to be obvious to all of my friends that I'm not writing.

(and a quick aside, by the way: I have very few Facebook friends. Some time ago I got rid of all the Facebook "friends" who were not my friends, particularly those from high school. Okay, actually, I unfriended everybody, and then, after I'd gotten that out of my system, asked about 25 people if they'd mind being my friend again. You can read about that by clicking here.)

Anyway, Bill then posted:

Bill Harrington You say that's the word count, but I'll bet you used a couple of them more than once.

March 19 at 3:18am via mobile ·

(Incidentally, Bill does not stay up until the wee hours trolling through Facebook. He lives in the U.K., where it's five hours later.)

Bill's comment prompted me, on Tuesday, to update my novel progress thusly:

Word count: 13,494*. The asterisk is at the request of Bill Harrington, who quite rightly pointed out that fact that there are many words that I used more than once, such as "the."

Granted, Tom tried to rush to my defense with:

Tom Harrington Based on Bill's criteria, Gertrude Stein never wrote anything over 100 words.

But the damage was done, and this was the point at which Jeff decided to demonstrate what a sadistic man he can be when he sets his mind to it.

I mean, I love to write. If someone gives me a challenge, I'm going to at least give it a shot.

Jeff probably knew that when he posted:

Jeffrey Pomerantz I hereby challenge you to write a minimum of 1,000 words without repeating any even once. It would be even more impressive than writing a novel without using the letter S.

Actually, there is a term for writing without a particular letter: lipogram. For example, if I have to rewrite "Mary Had a Little Lamb" without the letter "A," I might get:

Sweet girl M, with little sheep
With pretty wool, white snow,
Wherever precious sweet M went
The sheep would surely go  

Thank you. Thank you very much.

For the record--I don't have my Book of Lists handy, but it's in there somewhere (actually, The Book of Lists 2, I think)--there was a poet who actually wrote several Mary lipograms, each leaving out a letter (The one without "I" began: "Mary had a pygmy lamb...").

Perhaps the most celebrated lipogram was the certifiably insane work Gadsby, a 1939 novel by Ernest Vincent Wright. This genuinely deranged project involved writing a 50,000 word piece of fiction....without the letter "E." 

(Here's a link to the book, by the way.)

This is madness. About two-thirds of all the words in the English language have the letter "e." Check out how awkward the sentence following this one is when we leave out the letter "e." Look, if you will, at this cluster of words, and see, if you will, how difficult a task it is to tap out a bunch of words that lack this vital...um....wait...can't tap out that word, can I..so I will tap out...character.

And that was one sentence.

The author, in the introduction, claims that he actually tied down the "e" key so he wouldn't accidentally let an "e" slip in there.

To give you an idea of how awkward writing can get without that vital letter, here's an excerpt:

Upon this basis I am going to show you how a bunch of bright young folks did find a champion; a man with boys and girls of his own; a man of so dominating and happy individuality that Youth is drawn to him as is a fly to a sugar bowl. It is a story about a small town. It is not a gossipy yarn; nor is it a dry, monotonous account, full of such customary “fill-ins” as “romantic moonlight casting murky shadows down a long, winding country road.” Nor will it say anything about tinklings lulling distant folds; robins carolling at twilight, nor any “warm glow of lamplight” from a cabin window. No. It is an account of up-and-doing activity; a vivid portrayal of Youth as it is today; and a practical discarding of that worn-out notion that “a child don’t know anything.”

...you get the picture.

With this stunt of mine, I have joined the ranks of people who have written a piece of "constrained writing;" that is, writing that has some sort of strict rule. Jeff (him again) sent me the Wikipedia link, which is here.

I am proud to now be a member of such a club (I was also pretty impressed with the "Mary Had a Little Lamb" thing too, if you want to know the truth). At the same time, however, it's mighty nice to once again be back in the world of multiple uses of the same word, and all 26 letters of the alphabet. Suddenly, all the rest of my writing seems a lot easier.