It’s that time of year again – time for National Novel Writing Month! To commemorate my second year of NaNoveling, I found a new literary word: belletristic.
This fancy term comes from the French belles lettres (literally “beautiful letters”), which means “literature regarded as a fine art”. More specifically, it refers to “light and elegant literature, esp. that which is excessively refined, characterized by aestheticism, and minor in subject, substance, or scope”.
So the adjective belletristic means “written and regarded for aesthetic value rather than content” – in other words, the opposite of my NaNoWriMo novel!
I won’t care about aesthetics or content. The only thing that matters is word count. I guess the proper term would be beaucoup de lettres, right? ;) Art in its highest form.