The Elegant Variation: NOTA BENE: THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEWS, III

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October 21, 2008

NOTA BENE: THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEWS, III

"INTERVIEWER: How often do you write?

MARTIN AMIS: Every weekday. I have an office where I work. I leave the house and I'm absent for the average working day. I drive my powerful Audi three quarters of a mile across London to my flat. And there, unless I've got something else I have to do, I will sit down and write fiction for as long as I can. As I said earlier, it never feels remotely like a full day's work, although it can be. A lot of the time seems to be spent making coffee or trolling around, or throwing darts, or playing pinball, or picking your nose, trimming your fingernails, or staring at the ceiling.

You know that foreign correspondent's ruse; in the days when you had your profession on the passport, you put writer; and then when you were in some trouble spot, in order to conceal your identity you simply changed the r in writer to an a and became a waiter. I always thought there was a great truth there. Writing is waiting, for me certainly. It wouldn't bother me a bit if I didn't write one word in the morning. I'd just think, you know, not yet. The job seems to be one of making yourself receptive to whatever's on the rise that day. I was quite surprised to read how much dread Father felt as he approached the typewriter in the morning."

- Martin Amis, The Paris Review Interviews III*

* When we're starting out a new project, we're perhaps excessively interested in the quirks of other writers.

Posted at 12:07 AM in Nota Bene | Permalink

Comments

One becomes interested, indeed. Of course, if I had a pinball machine in *my* office I probably wouldn't get any work done at all.

Posted by: Wellington Boyd | October 21, 2008 at 04:59 PM

A powerful Audi. How reassuringly masculine.

Posted by: Andrew | October 26, 2008 at 03:06 AM

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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."

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Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

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October 21, 2008