The Elegant Variation: 2nd Most Popular Question Asked on Book Tour

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."

November 12, 2007

2nd Most Popular Question Asked on Book Tour

"How do you write [by computer, by hand, by typewriter] and when [morning, noon, night]?"

Many writers find this question annoying, probably because they believe that implicit in the question is the belief that anyone could compose a great novel if only they possessed the right pen. And no doubt some people believe this. But I do think how one writes has an impact on what one writes. For instance, I tell my students that no matter how busy they are they should try to write every day, even if only briefly. Better to write ten minutes a day six days a week than to write for an hour on a Saturday. That's because if you're writing every day, then you're living with your characters and you'll carry them with you as you go about your business. The longer the gap between writing sessions, the longer it takes you to re-immmerse yourself in the lives of your characters. What's more, I'm deeply suspicious of inspiration. A writer who waits to be inspired will never write. When I'm feeling inspired I usually produce my least inspired work (beware the inspired writer; he's too busy fallling in love with the sound of his own voice), and I frequently do my best work when I'm feeling least inspired. I believe in treating writing like a job, because that's what it is. Tie yourself to your chair and put in a certain number of hours every day, and you'll be surprised what you come up with. I keep a calendar above my desk with the number or hours (down to the minute) that I put in every day. That way I can't trick myself.

The other thing I'd say is that fairly early on in the writing of MATRIMONY my computer broke down and I was forced to write by hand for a few weeks. This ended up being a huge blessing. I'm a compulsive reviser; I can spend hours moving commas around and switching a few dialogue tags; I'm deeply, neurotically punctilious. But a novelist can revise too soon. It's like playing with the onrnamentation on the doorpost before you've laid down the foundation for the house. You're likely to end up with a beautiful scene that has no business being in the novel. This happened to me quite a number of times with early drafts of SWIMMING ACROSS THE HUDSON. But once I started to write by hand, this problem disappeared. My handwriting is terrible, so I had no illusions that the work was neat and finished. This allowed me to get around the problem of revising too soon. I was able to plow forward without looking back untill it was time to do so.

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November 12, 2007