Clever

As in:

Of course it was harder for frogs to adapt to writing because they were built for other things. Harder still for the younger frogs, like Solomon, who’d yet to acquire much bulk and muscle. Ink was not an option, given the liquid nature of the amphibian environments, so the only thing indelible was a good scratch in the mudstone with a pointed bit of mollusk shell. The forward press of this could be hazardous, as a sudden strike of writer’s cramp could send one’s face right into the work before you. This had happened more than once to Solomon, so he became a student in the Itsfatz method (named for its founder Buff Isfatz, a poet frog who was eaten by a small but beautiful heron while on the verge of mastering iambic pentameter). The method involved laying on one’s back and writing with the more muscular legs.

It was in this position over two days when, writing like Kerouac, he worked out his first important work, “Heartless,” which involved his supposed encounter with a large mouth bass. Trapped near the shore, he decided (or so he wrote that he did), to try to reason with the fish instead of trying to outswim it. Of course it worked, because otherwise he would not have lived to write it. But though it was clever and extremely witty, there were several critics who doubted that a large mouth bass would ever be open to conversation with a frog.

“The only way to know that would be to try,” Solomon said, somewhat famously, and in a way that suggested that it really was non-fiction, that he really had come nose-to-nose with a killer fish and explained his way out of the meal. You couldn’t much argue with the quality of the prose. It sure read like a true story. Besides, if you were a frog, you’d like to imagine it was true. That, alone, was very good for sales.