LITERATURE: BASS 2005 – Writing

I want to get one or two more stories read before I do another review of Best American Short Stories – 2005, but this is one of the reasons I read, to catch the writing style, and too often my immediate delight is forgotten when the story’s done.  So…

Hassan looked at Donk and shrug-smiled, his eyes rimmed with such a fine black line they looked as if they had been Maybellined.  (BASS 2005, p. 175)

The sentence is from Death Defier by Tom Bisell.  The stop-me-dead words are "shrug-smiled" and "Maybellined." 

I love when nouns are turned into verbs, verbs into adjectives , etc.  I love nothing better in my own writing when I check out those squiggley green lines from Windows spell-check and click "ignore." 

It’s man over machine.  Creativity over proper form.  It’s a love of language and the ways it can be twisted to say exactly what you see and feel when the language as it stands cannot fulfill the need.