Elena Ferrante Explains Why She Will No Longer Use Ellipses

“I used to use them freely; now I don’t use them at all. And yet I like them: in other people’s writing they don’t bother me, even if instead of three dots I find 10 in a row. But at a certain point, my eyes started to fly over those dots, moving on to grab hold of the words as quickly as possible. And in my own writing I began to feel they were flirtatious, like someone batting her eyelashes, mouth slightly open in feigned wonder. Too many graceful winking suspensions, in short.”