Originally the line was “I assassinate down the avenue,” it started as an exercise where you make a list of ten or twelve verbs that you may associate with a vocation, in this case “a spy,” and a list of random nouns. For the next step you take a pencil and draw lines randomly between the two, until something surprising happens in the way they interact. Can I assassinate an avenue? Can the avenue assassinate? When we’re left to our own devices, verbs and nouns tend to pair up in clichéd ways, but when a verb is acting on an unfamiliar noun it can really be exciting. It stimulates the language.
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