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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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« EXPECT TO SEE LOTS OF THESE POSTS | Main | TEV GIVEAWAY: BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN »

February 07, 2008

PAMUK INTERVIEW

Orhan Pamuk interviewed at Brooklyn Rail.

Posted by TEV at 01:11 PM in Interviews |

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"Well, at the heart of this great art of the novel that we’re talking about lies the human capacity to identify with what we call “the other.”
What a line...and what an epilogue to a simple interview (when he quotes from his Nobel Prize acceptance speech):
"I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy"

Posted by: blue cave | February 08, 2008 at 07:26 AM

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