The Elegant Variation: HELL, WE COULD HAVE TOLD YOU THAT WITHOUT SUFFERING THROUGH 400 NEW YORKER SHORT STORIES

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."

June 01, 2004

HELL, WE COULD HAVE TOLD YOU THAT WITHOUT SUFFERING THROUGH 400 NEW YORKER SHORT STORIES

This is a story that never seems to run out of steam. Every year or so, some pencil neck somewhere loads a bunch of Henry James or Gertrude Stein into a Cray somewhere and starts it churning and, when the smoke clears, we're left with some utterly random and generally useless observation about fiction. It's yet another way, it seems, that those with a scientific bent seem to grasp covetously at the one thing that eludes scientific explanation - the creative process.

Here's the latest version, in which a plucky Princeton student runs a bunch of New Yorker short fiction through the mill and comes up with this startling revelation:

The study was long on statistics and short on epiphanies: one main conclusion was that male editors generally publish male authors who write about male characters who are supported by female characters.

Well. What do you suppose the fuckin' odds of that one were?

Posted by TEV at 12:22 AM | Permalink

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That poor girl's parents--all that money on a Princeton education...Of course, the young lady had to slog through God knows how many Ann Beatties and Salman Rushdies so maybe she should be rewarded with a high-paying job...

Posted by: Jimmy Beck | June 01, 2004 at 06:49 AM

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June 01, 2004