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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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« SAMUEL BECKETT, APRIL 13, 1906 | Main | L.A. EVENT - SKYLIGHT READINGS, ELLROY, ABANI »

April 14, 2006

ALL DOWNHILL AFTER 25

With a handful of pages remaining in our book, it's probably not the best time to be reading articles about writer's block (or maybe it is).  Beware the mildly annoying pop-ups.

It fits, then, that the first great poet of writer's block was Wordsworth, whose Prelude is part of a paradoxically rich tradition of writing about the difficulty of writing. Wordsworth, like Keats, often battled with block, though neither was floored by it as spectacularly as Coleridge. The poems for which he is remembered, such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan (another classic of writing about the impossibility of writing), were all written when he was a young man. He remained a prolific letter writer and journalist for the rest of his life but he became increasingly unable to write what most mattered to him: poetry. He penned twice as many lines between the ages of 18 and 26 as in the following 36 years.

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