Spunk & Bite Page 2

  In the bell-ringing category, for example, I would include the jailhouse locutions captured by Tom Wolfe in his novel, A Man in Full: “Look, bruvva . . . I ain’t tryin’ a disrespectchoo . . . I ain’t tryin’ a sweatchoo, an’ I ain’t tryin’ a play you. So whatchoo doggin’ me for?”

  Would such locutions have delighted E. B. White? Probably not—but why we be doggin’ him about it? Only because few American locutionists stand taller than White, whose animated way with words continues to charm millions. We are not amused, then, to think that his advice to writers concerned itself more with boundaries than White-like flights above the rooftops.

  But never mind; for now we are ready to make our own ascent, ready to rise from the slush piles and pedways, ready to soar with E.B. and his like on the wings, the updrafts, of spunk and bite.

  Freshness

  THE WALLOP OF THE NEW

  TWO

  THE PLEASURES OF SURPRISE

  Readers love surprise. They love it when a sentence heads one way and jerks another. They love the boing of a jack-in-the-box word. They adore images that trot by like a unicorn in pajamas.

  Why does surprise please us? Think of it as a survival mechanism: Unexpected stimuli exercise the neurons, keeping brains alert to danger, prey, and available taxis. In fact, a recent study suggests that brains prefer surprise to the expected (see the “Synapses of Surprise” sidebar, below).

  But enough anthroposemiotic musing! Everyone knows that good writing stimulates readers with inspired, sneaky surprises. It does so at all levels, from surprises based on twists of plot and character to the smaller but keen surprises of language—the ones that concern us here.

  Is there a syntax of surprise, a formula for working it into our locutions? Yes and no. Surprise is like one of its vehicles: humor. Try to parse it, and it’s hasta la vista, bubela. Yet even humor yields an occasional secret to those who won’t let it alone. Remember when Woody Allen discovered that “if it bends, it’s comedy; if it breaks, it’s not”? That’s not a bad measure of the unexpected in your prose. Consider these two efforts in a New York Times article about the Windows XP operating system. The first one breaks apart: “When it comes to obsessive, clean-freak tendencies, Windows XP makes Jack Nicholson in As Good as It Gets look like a slob.” The image here is labored and arcane—intelligible only to those who have watched the movie, and even then, too ponderous to allow for surprise. But the second attempt, even with its technical jargon, bends and delivers: “You may have to update its BIOS . . . before installing XP, a procedure about as user-friendly as a wet cat.” Bingo! Dry tech-talk, and suddenly I’m smelling damp fur and feeling the scratches.

  START WITH THE EXPECTED

  Even as you set out to be surprising, gangs of predictable idioms and images will bully their way into first drafts. Let them appear, as they tend to do when the brain is spewing words. But in the editing process, show no mercy. Occide, verbera, ure! Kill, beat, and burn—sniff out and destroy everything that smells predictable, clichéd, formulaic, labored, or lazy. Force yourself to fill the gaps with language that hoists a big exclamation point (but not a question mark) above the reader’s head.

  Use familiar words in a new way; raid the coffers of poetry; recruit fresh words and images from specialized fields; tweak clichés and paired words—not the usual phrase all agog, for example, but something surprisingly else agog (radioactively agog?).Dare to use unfamiliar words with attention-getting qualities, such as mofongo or barmy. Concoct your own words now and then, as novelist Jonathan Kellerman did with firp (jerk) and yog (thug).You won’t score surprise every time with these efforts, but you’ll create pleasures an editor never expected from the slush mound.

  Consider this sentence: He crosses the consulting room’s red carpeting, his grotesquely ugly face like a big toad’s. No surprises here; just a tired word pair (grotesquely ugly) and a sorry metaphor. But if you were novelist Will Self, author of How the Dead Live, you’d have written: “He crosses the consulting room’s endometrial carpeting, his marvellously ugly face like a clenched fist in a glove puppet.” Three surprises hit me here: “endometrial,” because it is shockingly uncarpet-like, yet in keeping with the chapter’s context of medical horrors; “marvellously ugly,” an effective paradox; and the dead-on “glove puppet” metaphor for a scrunched face.

  * * *

  SYNAPSES OF SURPRISE

  Scientists have identified a patch of the forebrain called the nucleus accumbens as a center of pleasure in humans. Imaging shows heightened activity in this area of the brain when people receive a reward—whether sugar treats, money, or drugs.

  Though researchers have long known monkeys to favor unexpected rewards over expected ones, the same phenomenon has now been identified in humans: Unpredictable stimuli excite the nucleus accumbens, while expected stimuli elicit no response. In the experiment that led to this conclusion, researchers Gregory Burns (Emory University) and E. Read Montague (Baylor College of Medicine) administered squirts of Kool-Aid and plain water to human test subjects in either predictable (alternating) or random patterns. Pleasure-wise, random squirts won it all.

  A fresh locution may not be quite the same as Kool-Aid, but writers can extrapolate from the experiment’s conclusion: Brains love that little squirt of surprise.

  * * *

  THE BLESSING OF THE PREDICTABLE

  Writers may rant about the banality of everyday expression, but they also rely on it. Like every aesthetic element, surprise needs a foil; our habitual speech patterns provide it. A character in a Robert Stone novel remarks, “When you’ve heard what a Yank has to say in the first five minutes, you’ve heard everything he’ll say the rest of his life.” And it’s not just Yanks: most everyone communicates in stock patterns using a relatively small working vocabulary. Whatever the topic, people call in the usual skeleton crew of modifiers and images to tackle it, so that everything sounds alike and monotony sweeps the land. When surprise comes along, it’s like caffe freddo gushing from the Mojave.

  Some writers simply lasso unexpected zingers from their imaginations as the need arises. Others find—or stumble upon—a structure for surprise using one of many rhetorical devices. Here are just a few:

  Indirection, beloved by humorists, fakes one way and then reverses for a hook shot: “If love is the answer,” says Lily Tomlin, “could you rephrase the question?”

  Oxymoron pairs incongruous or contradictory terms to create surprise: engagingly demented; deep inconsequence.

  Personification, or prosopopoeia, gives life to inanimate or abstract objects: Excuse me, Sir—your liver is on the phone.

  Catacosmesis delivers statements in descending order of importance, often ending with a surprising triviality: I ask for peace, prosperity, and a bagel with cream cheese.

  Enallage uses one part of speech for another, such as a noun or adjective for a verb: Grammar? I’ll grammar you! (See Chapter 16.)

  Understatement says surprisingly less about more. For example, a Leslie Stella heroine (Fat Bald Jeff) allows that her hated suitor is “tall and virtually odorless.”

  Neologisms are invented word formations. Often they build on established word parts, as in schmooseoisie (referring to talk show hosts; “schmooze,” with a play on “bourgeoisie”) or para-pooch (a dog dropped by parachute). They are good for one surprise each. (See Chapter 14.)

  Change of diction from one level of English to another creates surprise if the shift is abrupt and justified. Within just a few lines of a short story (“The Sun, the Moon, the Stars”) Junot Díaz shifts from academic diction to street dialect—from a description of European sunbathers as “budget Foucaults” with “massive melanin deficit” to one of Dominican girlfriends who “can’t be no more than sixteen” and another of a woman “rocking a dope Ochun-colored bikini.” Television scriptwriters, too, speed-shift from one diction to another, as in lines like: “I believe I speak for everyone present here when I say: ‘Huh?’ ” (See Chapter 8.)

  S
ynecdoche and metonymy surprise by referring to a part or attribute of something, rather than the thing itself. Noting that he has heard a bearlike sound in the woods, Bill Bryson writes that his pocketknife is “patently inadequate for defending oneself against 400 pounds of ravenous fur.” (emphasis mine)

  * * *

  SURPRISE YOURSELF

  In the excerpts that follow, I’ve removed the key words that the authors used to create surprise—or that caught me pleasantly off-guard, at least, when I read them. See if you can equal or better them: try replacing the hint words (in brackets) with something unexpectedly perfect, avoiding the dumbfounding and bizarre. (The actual words used appear in the “Answers” section below.)

  1. “At Ozzfest, a pile of bands [played] through their inner children.”

  2. “His smile beamed everywhere in the large room, as if his teeth were [unbelievably shiny].”

  3. “. . . Martina Hingis, a shrinking star who has become as vulnerable as [a sitting duck].”

  4. “He was older than [the hills] now and [likely] to make his century.”

  5. “Svetlana Ivanova, a 57-year-old pensioner with a mind made up like [something tight-as-a-drum].”

  6. “They were foragers and gatherers, can redeemers, the people who [swayed] through subway cars with paper cups.”

  7. “How much cooler it is to save the world from the Nazis than [fret] over the NASDAQ.”

  8. “Sister Grace believed the proof of God’s creativity [came] from the fact that you could not surmise the life, even remotely, of his humblest shut-ins.”

  9. “If there are a number of visually interesting ways to shoot two heads floating in an endless expanse of H2O, Kentis has succeeded in finding [not too many] of them.”

  ANSWERS

  1. trolled (Ben Ratliff, The New York Times); 2. strangely iridescent (Jane Smiley, Moo); 3. dunk-tank victim (Selena Roberts, The New York Times); 4. kerosene, strong (Annie E. Proulx, “The Bunchgrass Edge of the World”); 5. marine’s bed (Michael Wines, The New York Times); 6. yawed (Don DeLillo, Underworld ); 7. swivet (Maureen Dowd, The New York Times); 8. eddied (Don DeLillo, Underworld); 9. exactly none (Mike D’Angelo, Esquire).

  * * *

  SURPRISINGLY APT

  Ultimately, the devices of surprise may set up the pins, but they don’t guarantee the strike. The essence of surprise is in its timing and execution: fast, graceful, and apt. Aptness is paramount. The best surprise of all may be how precisely an unexpected word or image pops a message. Unexpected is easy; unexpectedly perfect helps separate writers from hacks.

  THREE

  EXTREME EXPRESSION

  Try describing the extraordinary—say, the extremely large—and see what happens. Immediately the verbal channels are swamped by used-up modifiers: great; huge; enormous—all yesterday’s news. Cosmic. What isn’t? Way cosmic. Way lame. Most writers wish to go beyond such adjectives, to boldly go where no word maven has gone before. But a rolling blackout darkens the brain. Life in the universe seems beyond the wattage of language. The events of one day drain the thesaurus. So many extraordinary things, so few terms to describe them.

  Reaching for extremes, nonwriters (or lazy writers) fall back on the vocabulary of disbelief: “It was just . . . incredible. I mean, unbelievable. Absolutely mind-boggling.” Such terms may define the borders of one’s credulity; unfortunately, they fail to distinguish the Piazza San Marco from a piece a’pizza.

  Extraordinary subjects call for the might of imagery—power imagery, delivered as extreme figures of speech. I’ve dubbed such figures megaphors—and, for descriptions of the extremely small, miniphors. These special breeds of metaphor, simile, and hyperbole go the distance to catch the reader’s imagination.

  KILLER MEGAPHORS

  A megaphor uses images of imposing size, force, or notoriety to augment a subject in an attention-getting way. Make it novel and clever and it’s doubly hot—as hot as these megaphors were in their day: killer abs; avalanche selling; Dow Jones meltdown; smash-mouth football.

  Fresh is best, but used imagery often can be retrofitted for new applications: industrial-strength attitude; slam-dunk dissertation; poster child for failed diets. In dissenting from a majority opinion of the Supreme Court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once called the majority’s rationale “nothing short of a titanic surrender to the implausible.” As an image, the Titanic may be rusted out, but Ginsburg salvaged it with steel-plated moxie.

  Megaphors have thundered throughout world literature, augmenting everything from mead hall beasts to gumshoe hangovers. Dante summoned the great towers of Montereggione as megaphors for the titans of Hell. Whitman raised his “barbaric yawp” to celebrate himself. Joyce’s Daedalus went forth to “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”Chicago, now gentrified and stockyard-free, lives forever as the “Hog Butcher for the World . . . City of the Big Shoulders” in the megaphors of Carl Sandburg.

  Our frenetic culture has every type of writer scrambling for extreme expression. Journalists and writers of ads, scripts, and speeches live by images that outdistance, one-up, or out-hype all previous takes on a subject. As New York Times staffer Ira Berkow noted, “Incredible may be an understatement in a sports world of galloping hyperbole.” Hyperbole rules in all spheres of communication, including politics. Did a black hole in foreign policy give rise to the mother of all insurgencies? Is party principle melting faster than the polar ice caps?

  MIGHTY MAMMA NATURE

  For your own extreme imagery, you can start with natural forces:She’s a Mount St. Helens waiting to erupt. There’s an ozone hole in his thinking. Like El Niño hitting on La Niña. But when such cataclysmic megaphors as earthquakes and tidal waves wear thin (even in love scenes), writers need other forces to power their images. One such force is the high-profile personality, real or fictional. A sports agent is called the “Moses” of his clients. The old Jerry Seinfeld character cries, “She’s like a beautiful Godzilla!” Names such as Florence Nightingale and Martin Luther King connote big virtues, while such Evil Empire denizens as Hitler and Lord Voldemort ratchet up the villainy. And by combining columns A and B, one creates fearsome hybrids: Watch out—she’s Mother Theresa meets Hannibal Lecter!

  While they’re hot, superstars and other news makers can muscle up a sentence. When Buffy the Vampire Slayer ruled prime time, a phrase like Buffy Summers unleashed would have shattered walls. But megaphorists must weigh the shelf life of ephemeral imagery. In the first paragraph of this chapter, I risked an allusion to California’s rolling blackouts—now ancient history. A safer reference might have been to China’s Three Gorges Dam, the ongoing construction of which reporters have called “planetary in scale.” I shoulda said, “our brain hits the Three Gorges Dam.”

  And don’t forget: Arcane megaphors may delight a savvy audience, but their immensity will be lost on the unknowing. Novelist Martin Amis writes of a “Mahabharata of pain”; but to appreciate the image, a reader must be hip to the Mahabharata—a Hindu epic of some hundred thousand couplets. To use or not to use? One takes stock of one’s audience, and gives it one’s best.

  THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MINIPHOR

  The wee components of the universe challenge writers to venture ever shrimpier in their metaphors, finding new ways to downsize the extremely small and insignificant. Conventional modifiers—tiny, diminutive, microscopic—cause less shrinkage than a cold-wash cycle. Roget’s’ downsizings offer a few more choices: skosh, from the Japanese sukoshi, means “a little bit”; minikin refers to a petite and dainty person; soupçon means “just a suspicion of a trace”; and scintilla is a hissy word for “a piddling amount.”

  But a thesaurus can plunge only so far into the infinitesimal. Enter miniphors: metaphorical figures for the extraordinarily puny. One thinks first of the smallest entities, subatomic particles. Though short on sensuality, they speak of diminishing space and have wonderfully loopy names: “quark,” “lepton,” “gluon,” “muon,” and so on. A payc
heck the size of a muon is something most writers can relate to. Other miniphors can be pulled from numerical imagery; for example, nano-spans of attention, meaning “billionths of a span.” Even further down the minus powers of ten, picos, femtos, and zeptos make nanos look gargantuan.

  Sometimes the best miniphors, however, are based on moderately small items that the average reader can imagine. To physicists, particles in cloud chambers may connote “dinky”; but the smallness of zits, peanuts, and mustard seeds can be better pictured and felt by others. Likewise, a gnat’s-breath attention span seems as brief as a nano-span—even briefer if I imagine an out-of-shape gnat. And I could say, arcanely, that someone’s authority extends about one Planck length—a reference to the smallest reducible interval of time and space. But parsley on the fish, as one executive described her board’s role, says it even smaller.

  * * *

  IMAGERY, BIG AND SMALL

  Highway tragedies, toiletries—anything in the universe is grist for the creation of boffo metaphors. Here’s a sampling of what writers have appropriated lately to augment or diminish a subject. To build your own stock of extreme images, keep an eye out for the next big or little thing that has yet to be sucked into metaphor.