Jay Heinrichs - Word Hero: A Fiendishly Clever Guide to Crafting the Lines that Get Laughs, Go Viral, and Live Forever

Copyright 2011 by Jay Heinrichs

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

eISBN: 978-0-307-71637-8

Cover design by Jessie Sayward Bright

v3.1

To Sherry,
who proves that every bad vacation
can become the stuff of immortality

WIT IS THE ONLY WALL
BETWEEN US AND THE DARK .
Mark Van Doren

W HEN A FRIEND ASKED what I was writing these days, I replied, Im going to teach you to come up with the words theyll quote in your obituary.

She recoiled as if Id offered to design her coffin. So I added, Ever see the musical Fame? Where the song says, Baby, remember my name?

She nodded. Im going to live forever.

My book will help you do that. Only with words instead of singing and dancing.

I meant it too, having had experience with immortalitynot my own, but the lasting words in an important book. When I got into college, I celebrated by buying a copy of Bartletts Familiar Quotations for the breathtaking sum of fifteen dollars. Every day I switched on my new electric typewriter, typed a quote onto an index card, and taped the card outside my dorm room door. Naturally, classmates started calling me Quote Boy. I didnt mind; a guy on our hall threw up on a dean and earned the name Booter for the rest of his life. Besides, the quotes were a conversation piece and a way to meet women.

Even better, the words in Bartletts were the stuff of immortality. One of the cards I put up bore a quote from the Hindu Upanishads that was almost three thousand years old: The gods love the obscure and hate the obvious. Whatever that meant, I felt jealous. Imagine making anything that lasts three thousand years! I taped up the work of other immortals, like Ogden Nash.

NASH : A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of.

And Mark Twain.

TWAIN : When angry, count four; when very angry, swear.

And Cornelia Otis Skinner.

SKINNER : Womans virtue is mans greatest invention.

Each time I taped up a card, I wondered how that person did it. What was the magic behind words that went viral and stayed viral?

Many years later, I discovered the means: tools that produce brilliant words in striking order or that shift our view of reality. I share them in this book in the hope that theres a Quote Boy or Girlor even a Word Heroin you.

You have the motive but not the knowledge.
Take heart: in this section we explore the secrets
of memorabilityfocusing your thoughts, tapping
into inspiration, gaining an audiences attention,
and making your words stick.

PRACTICE WITCRAFT

M Y FIRST REAL LESSON in what I call witcraft came off a loading dock in Philadelphia. I was sixteen and just starting my first summer job at a department store. My assigned mentor, Al, was a man of the world at least two years my senior. He led me onto a semitrailer and pulled a thousand-dollar dress from a hanging rack.

Observe.

Al ripped the fabric down the middle, recorded the dress as damaged, and turned significantly to me. With responsibility, he said, comes great power.

I had heard the old chestnut about power and responsibility, but it had never occurred to me that a clich could be corrupted so deliciously. From that day on, I hung on to everything the guy said.

In retrospect, he wasnt all that witty, and his bon mot certainly wasnt worth a designer gown. Needless to say, Al proved to be a dubious moral guide; next day he taught me how to surf the roof of a moving delivery van. But that summer he became my first living Word Hero.