essay without the letter e

You Won't Find the Letter "E" in Either of These Two Novels

By mental floss uk | aug 5, 2016.

by Aliya Whiteley

The letter "E" is so integral to many languages that it’s amazing to think that even a short conversation could be conducted without it. For instance, in one episode of How I Met Your Mother , Lily and Robin challenge their friend Barney to try and get a girl’s phone number while wearing a trash bag and without using the letter "E." Okay, so he succeeds, but the conversation isn’t very scintillating. (And the garbage bag is not a great look, either.)

"E" is the most commonly used letter in the English language. Not only that, it’s the most commonly used letter in lots of languages, including French, German, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, Danish, and Dutch. So there are easier letters to omit if you decide to construct a lipogram—a text that deliberately omits a particular letter—no matter what your nationality.

All of which makes the fact that not one but two authors managed to complete entire novels without ever using the letter "E" all the more amazing.

Written in 1939, Ernest Vincent Wright's Gadsby is a 50,000 word novel—and there’s not an "E" in sight (at least not once you get past the author's name or the introduction, in which Wright mentions how people often told him that such a feat was impossible). But Gadsby sticks to its own rules admirably. If there are abbreviations used, they are only ones that still would not contain the letter "E" if written out in full. In order to make sure he didn't accidentally cheat, Wright reportedly tied down the letter "E" on his typewriter.

Inspired by Wright, Georges Perec decided to write his own novel without the letter "E"—in his first language, French. Published in 1969, it was called La Disparition and was later, incredibly, translated into English in 1994 by Gilbert Adair, who renamed it A Void (as the direct translation would have been The Disappearance which, you might have noticed, contains three examples of the letter in question).

La Disparation has since been translated into many languages in the same lipogrammatic form, including German, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Spanish, Turkish, Romanian, and even Japanese. You have to wonder who had the harder job here: the author of the original novel, or the writers who managed to stick to the rules when they translated it.

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Writing Exercise: Without any “E”

Heather over at RapturedHeart has inspired me to try something new and indeed a challenge.  She was inspired by this Plinky prompt :

Write a one hundred word story without using the letter “E.”

Some examples of works missing an e are Gadsby by Ernest Vincent Wright, a 50,000 word novel published in 1939 and La Disparition published in French in 1969 by George Perec, which was translated into English in 1995 as A Void .

The book Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn in 2001 is a progressive lipogrammatic story where letters are one by one being banned by the city as they fall off of their cherished statue of “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.”  A delightful read, I recommend it.

Here’s my lipogrammatic short:

An arctic wind pulls my hair into tufts as I walk.  I don’t mind, it brings my mind thoughts of him.  Our passion was short and vivid, knowing his ship would sail at dawn into a polar sun.  War took him away that brutal Spring morning and holds him now in its burning grasp.  I will always miss him, long for him, and wait for him. Will I fall into his arms and kiss his lips again? Night is falling, cold nips at my thin hands. I allow cold to numb my soul and carry away my pain.

I know that many of you have tried this as well – please send the link to yours in the comments!

To see Heather’s, click here .

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About Jodi L. Milner

18 responses to writing exercise: without any “e”.

Great little short, very lyrical. I remembered being assigned to read Gadsby in high school English and being blown away by a 200-page book with absolutely no “the” or “he” in it. What great exercise this must be for the brain!

It was liberating see just how many ways a thought could be expressed, however it also proves just how important it is to find and use the words that work best in a given setting.

Oh! Thanks for elaborating on this! A 50,000 word novel… now, that’s a bit much for me.

Can’t wait to see what people come up with.

The link takes you to the complete text – it’s amazing to read after trying to write without an E.

Pingback: Writing without “e” « Beneath the Lamp Post

Very good short.

These exercises (like the one syllable challenge I posted) cause us to be more conscious of word choice instead of reaching for our favorites off the shelf each time.

Thanks, Jo.

So true – I found myself thinking in circles for an hour after completing this exercise. Now I’m going to have to do the single syllable challenge!

His ship sailed at dawn? Oops. What about ‘his ship was to sail at dawn’?

Akk! You caught me – looks like this exercise is much more challenging than I thought at first. It’s fixed.

I’d never heard of lipograms. Seems like a very neat exercise to use with a high school English class.

For sure! They would get a huge kick out of it.

There’s an e in there! “sailed.” But this is amazing, what a cool exercise! 😉

Yep, I’m totally busted. I thought I was really careful when I checked it but it leaked through! This is why writers need to hire editors.

How can you ask this man – a hack, a fraud, a fool – to do such a thing? It is simply not within my brain’s grasp to spit out a string of words that lack this most tiny but critical part. Not if you want to follow my logic, that is.

Nice work on the vignette, by the way.

Fantastic! I dare say you have a poetic soul in there somewhere. I love how different each attempt turns out. Good work.

It is hard to say how to accomplish this. Lipograms try minds, forcing us to think in an unusual way. Common words vanish as particular symbols fall into inusitation. Such a story inhabits book racks but it is too dramatic to copy its motif. I will only go this far but no farther.

I find it incredible (yes, I’m done now) that anyone could continue without letters for more than a few paragraphs. Especially in French.

I love how yours turned out!

Almost made it, farther has one! Love it, thanks for taking a crack at it – these have been fun for everyone.

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A Man Wrote An Entire Book Without The Letter ‘E’

In A Nutshell

You may not be overly familiar with an American author named Ernest Vincent Wright, but he once pulled off one of the greatest literary accomplishments conceivable. It was also one of the most peculiar self-imposed challenges you can imagine, as he penned an entirely novel of more than 50,000 words without once using a word that contained the most common letter in English, the humble “e.”

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One of the most famous literary challenges in history was when Dr. Seuss received a challenge from his publisher that he could only use 50 words to write an entire book. That’s all well and good, and it’s a tough challenge, to be sure. However, Ernest Vincent Wright would no doubt scoff, as he challenged himself to pen an entire 50,000 word novel without once using the letter “e.”

What’s more, he somehow managed to pull it off. The final product was Gadsby , which is about a man named, well, Gadsby, who tries to save his city with the help of a youth group. Yeah, Gadsby isn’t exactly, well, “Gatsby” but what do you expect from a self-published book with such insanely rigid writing constraints? It took Wright nearly six months to complete the work, and in his introduction pages he mentions how coming up with the numerous challenges that came up along the way.

One of the biggest challenges faced was replacing pronouns, since it’s tough to write a sentence, let alone a novel, without words like “he” or “she” or “her” and so forth. Additionally, he was forced to find ways to work around using past tense words that typically end in “-ed” which, as you might imagine, is more than a little tricky.

Still, Wright did manage to come up with 50,110 words and a full story without any cheats, making it one of the most successful lipograms in the history of writing. Wright self-published the book in 1939, though as anyone who has self-published before can relate, the book didn’t receive much attention, and even the attention it did get was merely to talk about whether it was some stunt. The novel was read primarily by people scouring it to find any slip-ups or cheats, so convinced were they that Wright simply must have used them.

The entire novel is available online to read for free, as it entered the public domain in 1968. It’s a good thing, too, as the warehouse that contained the majority of the copies burned down, destroying enough of the books that it has since become a rare book collector’s prize, with copies being valued at thousands of dollars due to their scarcity.

At the end of the day, of course, it remains a truly spectacular accomplishment. After all, “e” is the most commonly used letter in the English alphabet, with more than 11 percent of all words in the Oxford dictionary containing at least one “e.”

Show Me The Proof

Oxford Dictionaries: What is the frequency of the letters of the alphabet in English? Bookride: Gadsby Gadsby , Ernest Vincent Wright

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