The Elegant Variation: OH CRAP. LOOKS LIKE THE LITERARY NOVEL IS DEAD YET AGAIN

TEV DEFINED

The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

November 17, 2003

OH CRAP. LOOKS LIKE THE LITERARY NOVEL IS DEAD YET AGAIN

Time Magazine regales us with the obligatory "Literature is Dead" stuff & nonsense.

Ipsos BookTrends is a service that tracks consumer book purchases — numbers that, unlike sales figures for albums or movie tickets, are rarely seen outside the industry. According to Ipsos, 34% of all novels sold in the U.S. this year were romance novels. Six percent were fantasy and science fiction, and 19% were mysteries and thrillers. Only 25% fell under "general fiction," the category that includes the even smaller subdivision of literary novels: your Jonathan Franzens, your David Foster Wallaces, your E. Annie Proulxs. Statistically speaking, the literary novel is a small part of a very big picture.

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November 17, 2003