I’m off to Lollapuzzoola this Saturday, and releasing The Journal of Wordplay #2 on Monday! In the meantime, let’s finish this roundup of writing with various constrained vocabularies:
Length-Based: “Will Rose Pass Cobb?” by Eric Chaikin. Some word lipograms will only allow words including a certain number of letters. For instance, you could compose a decent short work out of nothing but four-letter words. Chaikin already has.
I miss Beyond Wordplay, a Medium publication that used to do the same sort of things I tend to do here. One of its more remarkable works was this short piece of Chaikin’s, a slight reinterpretation of a key moment in sports history.
“Just needs” looks to be a typo, but easily correctable to “Just need” or “He’ll just need.”
Similar is “Dun Gin and a Rag Inn,” an RPG rulebook made out of one-, two-, and three-letter words. You can find it here. It’s the recent creation of a Redditor who goes by dudewithtude.
Beat-Based: The works of Paulose VD. VD has made a name for himself in India by composing works using only one-syllable words. “Thoughts on the Site of My Old Home” is a 600-line poem, “Elegy Written at Elavor” was a 1202-line poem (title presumably excluded), and Joy Lost and The Lost Home are full-fledged books, with the latter at 1416 lines of iambic tetrameter. Though based in India, he writes in English. As you can probably guess from the titles, VD’s work is thick with nostalgia and regret at the passage of time.
Or so I’m told. I haven’t been able to find these works for myself, either online or for purchase. That usually raises my suspicions a bit, but The Times of India and the Limca Book of Records are both reliable sources, so I believe the works do exist. If you know anything about where the works can be found, give me a shout.
Alliterative: “Mastermind.” The Real Frii, aka Christopher Elliott, was recognized in 2020 for creating Mastermind, a 724-word book with 340 words starting with the letter M. That’s 41.44%, not bad at all, and Record Holders’ Republic argues it deserves a world record on that basis. It could be considered a word lipogram, since the non-M words seem to be limited to exclamations and prepositions.
However, I recall a 55-word short story that is purely alliterative, Glen Starkey’s “Werling.” I’m not usually too enthusiastic about fiction where the point is “This guy? He freakin’ SUCKS.” But something about Starkey’s piece makes me smile. He reproduced it here, but I think I can present it below:
Werling Werner was witless. Without worrying whether wife Wilma was working, Werling wasted wampum willfully. Worthless Werling was workless. When Werling woke wondering what wife Wilma was wanting, we wondered why Werling wanted women. Werling was without wisdom. Women want warmth. Wilma was wet. Werling Werner’s weenie was worthless. Wilma went without. Woe was Werling.
There are also longer alliterative passages at the start and end of Alphabetical Africa, which uses only A-words in its first chapter, then A- and B-words, then A-, B-, and C-, and so on before reducing its range back down to A-words.
Honorable mention: Never Again by Doug Nufer.
In this survey of “limited literature,” I’ve excluded any works that use constrained writing but could theoretically include any word (or almost any word). For instance, there’s rhopalism, where each word is one letter longer than the previous word, and pilish, where the length of each word maps to the digits of pi. (Pilish does, natually, exclude words that are longer than ten letters, but that’s a trivial percentage of the total number of words in the language.)
But I did want to reserve special attention for Doug Nufer’s book. It allows the use of any word in the English language—but each word can only be used once. Here’s how the tale begins, as a gambler decides he’ll break with old patterns by making sure to do nothing that he’s ever done before:
The full Never Again is out of print, and even the promotional excerpt is an increasingly challenging read. I feel like this one’s a noble experiment that is just too challenging, especially as a full-length novel. But I think there are brighter possibilities for variations on the idea. Maybe a book that just never uses the same noun, or verb?