The Elegant Variation: DIDN'T WE JUST COVER THIS STORY?

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June 06, 2006

DIDN'T WE JUST COVER THIS STORY?

In the Department of Nothing New Under the Sun, Canada's Book Expo seems to raise the same kinds of worries that the American version offered up.

Yet there seems little joy in the book biz these days. People in the industry — writers, agents, publishers, distributors and booksellers — seem to worry as much as those in the music industry, conventional TV broadcasting, AM radio and all the other cultural ecosystems supposedly on the endangered list. When Roy MacSkimming published his well-regarded history of Canadian publishing in 2003, he called it The Perilous Trade.

Sure, book types say, more books are being published than ever before, and more people want to write them. But the books that are being published lack literary merit while their marketing and promotion are a poor man's echo of what General Mills does for a new cereal. The worriers point out that, per capita, fewer people are buying books, serious readers are a minority, authors don't have the cultural importance of Lindsay Lohan and George Clooney, and if their book isn't noticed by Oprah or the Giller Prize judges, fuggedaboutit.

There's even a cranky Updike quote to complete the experience.

Posted at 12:19 AM in The Wonderful World of Publishing | Permalink

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If you've already covered it, why blog about it again? While the Canadian book industry, as in many other countries, is experiencing similar changes and challenges to the book trade as found in the US, it might be more interesting to look for the subtle, but important, differences inherent in its structure (i.e., population base, economic drivers, etc) and content (i.e., what kinds of books are being published).

Posted by: Anon | June 06, 2006 at 08:41 AM

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MY NOVEL

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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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The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

June 06, 2006

DIDN'T WE JUST COVER THIS STORY?

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MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog. A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog "Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

June 06, 2006

DIDN'T WE JUST COVER THIS STORY?

Comments

Verify your Comment

Previewing your Comment

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MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE: Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism