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Joyce Carol Oates, On Boxing) OTHER FIXES Writing is about force, about driving home an idea. And extreme imagery is one good means to that end—but only one. For reducing or enlarging a subject, there are other devices—among them the affixes (attachments to words) that mean “greater” or “lesser” in a figurative way. Consider, for example, the diminishing suffixes used in the following sentence: Factoids from sourcelings get little respect in serious writing; fiction editors look for characters, not characterettes; for thoughts, not thoughtsies.

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 image here is labored and arcane—intelligible only to those who have watched the movie, and even then, too ponderous to allow for surprise.

Here, images of a building “the color of a stained shirt collar,” or of somebody’s “lung-colored socks,” have the feel of Sunday funnies. ” The sky makes for a good practice canvas. Every mood suggests a different swatch, whether “ash-bourbon” (Chabon), “indecipherable- lilac” (van Gogh), or “like the pink tongue of a thirsty dog” (Isaac Babel, Odessa). But too much image can bring on the clouds. It’s hard to picture a sky “as blue as the ribbon on a prizewinning lamb,” as Chabon describes it. The blasted lamb keeps getting in the way.