Maybe E.L. Doctorow was right when he said "Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia". Today I'd like to talk about writers that were OBSESSED (I cannot think of a better word) with letters or words... or arent' they all?
In any case, Stephen King has the protagonist of Misery (lying in Annie Wilkes's bed) write a novel with a typewriter that's missing a letter. We read his manuscript, where that letter is missing, as proof of the absurdity and desperation of his situation. The situation worsens when other letters go missing, to the point that the protagonist has to fill in the gaps with a pencil, or maybe avoid the words that contain too many of the missing letters.
Well, at least there was an excuse here, but there are other writers who didn't have one and they still did it: write whole novels without using a particular letter. Take George Perec, whose book, La Disparition is written with French words and expressions that don't contain the letter "E". And guess what, the team of translators (because yes, one would not be enough) into Spanish translated it without using the letter "A", entitling the book El secuestro.
American writer, Ernest Vincent Wright, professor at the Technological Institute in Massachussetts wrote a book in 1939, entitled Gadsby that contains 50,110 words and not even one "E".
And then you have the opposite trend, authors who wanted a letter to be in the limelight throughout their whole book. Such as a weird poem in latin by German writer Christianus Pierus entitled Christus crucifixus. A thousand verses where all words start with "C". Or Russian writer Nikolái Kultiápov, who wrote a book with 16,000 words ALL of them starting by "O" in Russian...
What do you think???
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