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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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July 16, 2008

NOTA BENE: THE GHOST WRITER

"I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning. And if I knock off from this routine for as long as a day, I’m frantic with boredom and a sense of waste. Sundays I have breakfast late and read the papers with Hope. Then we go for a walk in the hills, and I’m haunted by the loss of all that good time. I wake up Sunday mornings and I’m nearly crazy at the prospect of all those unusable hours. I’m restless, I’m bad-tempered, but she’s a human being too you see, so I go. To avoid trouble she makes me leave my watch at home. The result is that I look at my wrist instead. We’re walking, she’s talking, then I look at my wrist—and that generally does it, if my foul mood hasn’t already. She throes in the sponge and we come home. And at home what is there to distinguish Sunday from Thursday? I sit back down at my little Olivetti and start looking at sentences and turning them around. And I ask myself, Why is there no way but this for me to fill my hours?"

- Philip Roth*, The Ghost Writer

*Explanations coming soon, we swear.

Posted by TEV at 12:10 AM in Nota Bene |

Comments

Few better than Roth on writing. From "The Anatomy Lesson," in a moment of despair:

"Let the others write the books. Leave the fate of literature in their good hands and relinquish life alone in your room. It isn’t life and it isn’t you. It’s ten talons clawing at twenty-six letters. Some animal carrying on in a zoo like that and you’d think it was horrifying. 'But surely they could hang a tire for him to swing on—at least bring in a little mate to roll around with him on the floor.' If you were to watch some certified madman groaning over a table in his little cell, observe him trying to make something sensible out of qwertyuiop, asdfghjkl, and zxcvbnm, see him engrossed to the exclusion of all else by three such nonsensical words, you’d be appalled, you’d clutch his keeper’s arm and ask, 'Is there nothing to be done? No anti-hallucinogen? No surgical procedure?' But before the keeper could even reply, 'Nothing—it’s hopeless,' the lunatic would be up on his feet, out of his mind, and shrieking at you through his bars: 'Stop this infernal interference! Stop this shouting in my ears! How do I complete my life’s great work with all these gaping visitors and their noise!'”

Posted by: AJG | July 16, 2008 at 12:28 PM

spot on!

Posted by: Jerry Sticker | July 16, 2008 at 01:10 PM

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