Long, long ago I read a short story that involved a writer who loved to write but was constantly rejected for publication. Somehow, he ends up with a box that is an “adjective magnet” — when he passes it over what he’s written, it removes all the floridity (?) from his work and what is left behind is concise, eloquent prose.

The ONLY reference that I’ve found for this online is here:

Also, in a science fiction story I once read the protagonist — a writer of fiction — meets an alien who gives him an “adjective magnet” he can use to clean up his stories. If he holds it at some distance, only the longest adjectives are lifted off the page. Held very close, it even takes monosyllabic ones. In between, presumably, there is a distance that would produce prose of optimal sparseness.

The only other bit of “colour” I can think of is that I think the writer in the story lived in a brownstone townhouse, and may have had older family members living with him who were recent immigrants from Eastern Europe. But I could be mixing that with a different story. I don’t recall an alien, but I wouldn’t swear that there wasn’t one either.

Help? Has anyone else read it? Do you know where it’s from? (I love the concept, and after I’ve written things I actually do an edit pass to see where I’ve added stuff that could be removed.)

Thanks!
Kara

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