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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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October 30, 2007

NOTA BENE: DIARY OF A BAD YEAR

"A novel?  No.  I don't have the endurance any more.  To write a novel you have to be like Atlas, holding up a whole world on your shoulders and supporting it there for months and years while its affairs work themselves out.  It is too much for me as I am today."

- J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (Stunning work - his best since Disgrace.)

Posted by TEV at 01:16 PM in Nota Bene |

Comments

what did you like about Disgrace? I didn't get it.

Posted by: jarpie | November 07, 2007 at 07:33 PM

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