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  29. The use of ephemeral pop imagery in figures of speech—we call it ephemeragy—can be as captivating as, well, Spider Man’s web-goo. When the image is hot and deftly used, it amuses readers and makes the writer look with-it. But the risks are high: An image can be perceived as too obscure, too dated, too out of place. Pick a pop star, politician, and cartoon character (or other rhetorical figures) and use them in separate similes. Examples: “forearms . . . the size of Danny DeVito” (Dave Barry); “He . . . felt [his baby’s] . . . soft kitten belly, her ribs like pasta. She looked a little like George Costanza” (Matthew Klam).

  30. When it comes to that much-trumpeted quality called “edge,”editors look for writing that pushes some element—situation, event, imagery, language—to the limit, to that precarious divide between uneasiness and displeasure. In literary expression, edge has less to do with foul-mouthing than with words in turmoil and an irresistibly nervous-making style: dueling voices, conflicted grammar, agitated repetition, odd usages, psychotic metaphors—whatever waggles a reader’s ganglia. Here’s a sample of Martin Amis’s agitated style:

  As he climbed from the car a boobjob of a raindrop gutflopped on his baldspot. Lovetown: a sprung-rhythm land of earthquake, brushfire, and mudslide, of stripmall freeway and gridlock, of . . . blackeye, of whitehair, of yellowtongue. (Yellow Dog).

  Write a few pages of biography as if some madness forces your hand, like there’s no telling your limits. Then edit the lunacy not to dull it, but to hone its edge to a diamond keenness—to a pointedness that, as much as anything, yields spunk and bite.

  ALSO BY ARTHUR PLOTNIK

  The Elements of Editing

  The Man Behind the Quill: Jacob Shallus, Calligrapher of the United States Constitution

  The Elements of Authorship

  The Elements of Expression

  The Urban Tree Book

  Footnotes

  To return to the corresponding text, click on the reference number or “Return to text.”

  Chapter 16

  1Sali Tagliamonte and Chris Roberts. “So Weird; So Cool; So Innovative: The Use of Intensifiers in the Television Series Friends” (paper presented at a meeting of the American Dialect Society, Boston, Mass., 2004).

  Return to text.

  *Seamus Heaney, from remarks at a reading

  Return to text.

  Copyright © 2007 by Arthur Plotnik

  Originally printed in hardcover November 2005.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher. Published in the United States by Random House Reference, an imprint of The Random House Information Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Plotnik, Arthur.

  Spunk & bite : a writer’s guide to bold, contemporary style / Arthur Plotnik.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-72335-3

  1. Authorship. 2. English language—Rhetoric. 3. English language—Style. I. Title. II. Title: Spunk and bite.

  PN147.P55 2007

  808’.042—dc22 2006100292

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