Creative writing - Mike Sanders 2014
Comparing with similes
Energetic figures of speech
Speech, voice, and point of view
Mr. Burke plunged 23 stories, hitting the pavement like a garbage bag filled with vegetable soup.
Splat! This example constitutes a disagreeable description, but that’s its purpose: thinking about the plummeting man’s impact in terms of chunky, red-colored soup and a squishy plastic bag is so vivid, it will leave many readers squirming in their seats.
As you’ve witnessed throughout this chapter, you can use any variety of figures of speech to hold your reader’s attention. A simile is perhaps the easiest and most vivid to employ. They make your writing more creative and help readers generate powerful mental images.
DEFINITION
A simile is a figure of speech that uses the words like or as when making a comparison. A simile usually compares two quite different things in a way that helps the reader form a mental picture.
Here are some examples—funny, disturbing, or perhaps both—that demonstrate how easily similes can perk up your written descriptions:
The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her like a dog at a fire hydrant.
Hailstones leapt from the pavement like maggots being fried in hot grease.
The plan was simple-minded, like my friend Laura. But unlike Laura, the plan might just turn out okay.
Criticism rolls off me like a duck.
Daura’s lips were red and full, like tubes of blood drawn by an inattentive phlebotomist.
Using similes attracts attention and appeals directly to your reader’s senses (remember the importance placed on using the five senses in Chapter 2?), encouraging their imaginations to embrace what’s being communicated. In addition, similes inspire lifelike quality in daily talk and in the characters of a work of creative writing. Perhaps most significantly, they allow readers to relate your feelings to their own personal experiences. Therefore, the use of similes makes it easier for your readers to understand the subject matter of what you’ve written, which may have been otherwise too demanding to be comprehended. Like metaphors, similes also offer variety in ways of thinking and provide new perspectives for viewing the world.
As a way of relating similes to the other figures of speech as tools in your writing, remember that fresh, original figures of speech enliven a text, whereas dull, overused ones weigh down the text. An excerpt from the creative nonfiction piece “The Skeleton Woman” illustrates this maxim in action. In it, the boy narrator (a primary school student) describes how his retired scientist mother stores the human skeleton she used in her research:
She kept the skeleton in a corner of the upstairs cedar closet. It was easy to miss on account of all the various things clinging to different parts of it: winter caps stacked upon its smooth head; heavy old shirts and frayed coats flung over its shoulders; an assortment of Christmas ornaments hanging from its lower ribs; and a child-sized basketball resting in its pelvis. The piled hats leaned slightly to one side, affording the skull a jaunty aspect, while the rough clothing drooping from the shoulders hung irregularly—not unlike rock-hewn prehistoric furs from some distant cold-climate predecessor of us. The basketball resting in the midsection suggested an impossible pregnancy, and the bone-suspended ornaments could not help but appear festive, speaking, it seemed to me, of some secret grisly truth yet to be celebrated. A big steel rod rose out of a metal base resting on rollers and ran upward through the spinal column before terminating in the skull, creating the illusion of a body somehow hovering in air of its own volition, feet dangling three or four inches above the floor.
Despite the novelty of the thing’s presence, the skeleton really was just another item in storage—something put away, half-forgotten. Sometimes when I was helping Mama in the closet, she would address the occupant with “And how are we today, my good man?” or “Excuse us, sir” or “Don’t mind us, old friend.” She always seemed happy to see him—an acquaintance from another time; a fondly remembered ally from a war long over.
I would visit him sometimes when I was upstairs alone, rush of cedar as I swung forth the door and flipped on the light. Carefully I would place my little hand against his, studying the contrast, and then pressing each of my fingers against a corresponding fleshless digit.
Even at that age I did not need my mother to tell me this was what I would be some day. That it was what lay in store. Some fundamental cognition knew. And it was comforting in a way, a privilege, to have this visual testament available day or night, close at hand and always the same, which seemed to say, “Beneath all the motion and coating of life, here is what you are.”
I have no recollection of the truth of this ever troubling me. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact he did not seem to mind it so much himself. Whenever I opened the door, his expression was the same. He was always smiling.
WRITING PROMPT
Make a list of the different figures of speech that appear in this excerpt. Then go back and place asterisks next to those you believe give the most energy to the narrative’s pacing.
In the interests of not foiling your writing prompt, I’ll refrain from elaborating on the figures of speech in this excerpt. Instead, I will point out one of the larger meanings they help fuel. For instance, you likely know the expression “skeletons in the closet” and that it refers to secrets from one’s past. As it turns out, the narrative’s skeleton is a metaphor for the mother’s secrets concerning her child—only she also literally has a skeleton in her closet. This may be interpreted as a symbolic and macabre form of ironic humor, which is confirmed at the conclusion of the excerpt by the skeleton’s perpetual smile. (All human skulls appear to smile when they’re not covered by the flesh, muscle, and tissue that conspire to cover the mouth and jaw.) Hence, the boy narrator is reassured by the skeleton’s smile, even though it’s not actually smiling, in the living human sense of the word, at all.
If your creative work lends itself to the occasional use of a figure of speech, go for it. Just try to be creative when you use language in this way. One of my favorite uses of such wording—as witnessed in my utilization of the skeleton—is to say something and then insist I meant the literal, not the figurative, interpretation. A writer friend does this to me all the time. If I say of a manuscript page, “Let’s toss it,” she will crumple up the page and hurl it somewhere, often at me, rather than deleting some of the manuscript’s writing, which is what I really meant.
I have often thought such a reaction could prove a wonderful inspiration for a character who is forever taking things literally and causing problems (or just laughter for readers) over it. None of this has to be difficult. Just think about how you say everyday things (like the preceding example) and then have fun goofing around with it.
However you choose to employ figures of speech in your writing, enjoy the process of creating new ways to say the same old things.
The least you need to know
· In metonymy, a thing’s drab common name is colorfully replaced by its meaning or the characteristics it possesses.
· Synechdoches are a type of metonymy in which the name of a part is substituted for that of a whole, or vice versa.
· Personification attributes human characteristics to an abstract quality, animal, or inanimate object.
· A metaphor is a comparison between two things, based on resemblance or similarity, without using like or as.
· A simile uses the words like or as to compare two quite different things in a way that helps the reader form a mental picture.