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  • 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."
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June 25, 2004

L.A. READING - GAYLE BRANDEIS

L.A. area novelist Gayle Brandeis, whose The Book of Dead Birds we picked up at BEA (intrigued by both Toni Morrison's endorsement and its having won the Bellwether Prize - about which I plan a more detailed posting in the near future) will be reading this Saturday as part of the L.A. Writers Series at Antioch University.

The reading will be held at 7 p.m. at the Culver City location, 400 Corporate Pointe, Room A1000 and admission is free. We're hoping to check it out ourselves if we can manage our time this weekend. If you'd like to check out some of her work, we're told she has a new story up over at Vortical Magazine, called The Hurricanes of 2000 Come to Me as Lovers.

Posted by TEV at 12:26 AM |

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