Top Highlights

• 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.
• 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 yo...
• Unpredictable stimuli excite the nucleus accumbens, while expected stimuli elicit no response.
• 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...
• 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.