In middle school, most people learn that repetition in writing is bad. Instead of using the same word over and over, you should make use of some good, old-fashioned synonyms, right? Right!
Or...is it?
What elegant variation is
It wasn't until I was doing my MA in creative writing that I discovered the evils of elegant variation--referring to something lots of different ways in the same scene. For example:
The phone rang. Sam reached for the cell, flipped it open, and cleared the call. Seconds later the device was clamoring again for his attention. He switched the Nokia to silent, and shoved the offending object in a drawer.
Why it's bad
In the above paragraph, one object is referred to in five different ways. This circumvents repetition, but at the price of making the writer sound at best like a hopeless n00b, at worst like some sort of lunatic who can't decide what to call a phone. Aside from sounding bad, the lack of continuity can also be confusing for the reader. It can easily become unclear whether or not the same object is being referred to throughout the scene.
A phone is always going to be a phone; there's no use trying to hide that fact by calling it all sorts of things instead of plain old "phone". Likewise, a banana isn't an "elongated yellow fruit" (an example from the Wikipedia entry on elegant variation). Well, strictly speaking, a banana is an elongated yellow fruit, but you would sound pretty silly if you referred to it that way.
Instead of using an endless stream of synonyms, try constructing your sentences in a way that avoids both unnecessary repetition and elegant variation. For example:
The phone rang. Sam flipped it open and squinted at the screen. With a sigh, he cleared the call. Seconds later it rang again. He switched the phone to silent, opened the desk drawer, dropped the phone into it, and slammed the drawer shut.
This paragraph's meaning is the same, but the writing is clearer and isn't distracting the reader from what's happening in the story with all sorts of weird synonyms.
Now, I'll readily admit that I'm a recovering synonym user, guilty of elegant variation to a shameful degree. But what about you? Was your phone ever a "clamoring device," a "plastic communicator," or a "handheld gadget"?
Or was it just a phone?
Haha, I don't think I've ever done anything that bad. My problem is that I work on sections of paragraphs/sentences with different amounts of focus. In my brain everything gets worked out, but somehow I always end up with a bunch of sentences that use the same word twice. It's usually something along the lines of "the bright sun glared brightly" . . . only less lame. :)
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