Zoinks, pt. II

Madlibs Answers

In case you missed it, you’ll want to read last week’s post first, otherwise this one might not make sense.

Did anyone give the Madlibs an honest try? I’d love to hear what you came up with, where you guessed right, and where you swung at the high fastball and got nothing but wind. (Happy World Series season to all who celebrate.)

This was a (hopefully) fun way to think about syntax, diction, surprise, and contending with cliché.

Answers in Bold!

Literary Madlib #1

from Ottessa Moshfegh’s short story “The Weirdos”:

He told me I was the sign he’d been waiting for and, like looking into a crystal ball, he’d just read a private message from God in the silvery vortex of my left pupil.

Maybe you guessed the first few, but as the sentence builds, so does the surprise. I especially like “silvery vortex” and the specificity of “pupil” rather than “eye.” It makes, as the title suggests, weirder, the situation funnier, and the character more peculiar.

Literary Madlib #2

from Yiyun Li’s novel The Book of Goose:

Some people are born with a special kind of crystal instead of a heart. No, I am not talking about witchcraft, but it is a mystery that these people, who look no different than others, can sail through life without illness, injuries, or broken hearts.

Did you guess it? '“Crystal” is the real surprise here. The sentence that follows rides on the back of that metaphor, doing the work of extension and clarification, which itself is another avenue of surprise—the way the mind connects one thing to another and how it moves. Aphorisms can work (see Ferrante, Lucia Berlin, and Sarah Manguso), but only next to specificity and fully-fleshed characters. (IMO, obvs.)

Literary Madlib #3

from Lorrie Moore’s novel Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?:

In Paris we eat brains every night. My husband likes the vaporous, fishy mousse of them. They are a kind of seafood, he thinks, locked tightly in the skull, like shelled creatures in the dark caves of the ocean, sprung suddenly free and killed by light; they’ve grown clammy with shelter, fortressed vulnerability, dreamy nights. Me, I’m eating for a flashback.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a better example of what I’m talking about wrt surprise than in the fiction of Lorrie Moore. “Me, I’m eating for a flashback.” What a sentence. Another writer might’ve said, “While eating these delicacies, I thought back to the old days blah blah blah.” And has anyone ever combined the words “fortressed” with “vulnerability”? You can feel this sentence, not only in the texture of the language, but in the texture of the mind.

Literary Madlib #4

from Garielle Lutz’s “I Was in Kilter with Him, a Little”

I once had a husband, an unsoaring, incompact man of forty, but I often felt carried away from the marriage. I was no childbearer, and he was largely a passerby, minutely berserk in his bearing.

Ah, to be precise and suggestive. And the sound play. Read it aloud and let it sink in in all its explicit and implicit glory.

Maybe it’s tacky to quote something so fresh, but earlier this morning Lincoln Michel published an interview with Erin Somers over on his wonderful Substack about her new novel, The Ten Year Affair. Somers succinctly described what I’m getting at here:

On the syntax level, my constant exhortation to myself is, “Push for a better word.” Precision is key. Specific language works better than vague language. A word that is unexpected or particular to a certain character works better than a throw-away word. If I can surprise the reader, great. That’s the aim. Cliche is permissible only in dialogue and only if I’m sending up the character for using a cliche.

Let me know if you actually did any of these Madlibs. How’d you do? What’d you come up with?

See you next week for more fishy vulnerability and berserkery.

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Remember to spread the love to your local libraries, independent booksellers if you can, or shop online at Bookshop. Thanks, as always, for reading.