ou’ve been told over and over that we writers must read to improve our craft. Over at the Write to Publish course, we’ve been practicing critiquing. I’ve learned writers can’t just read, we must critique!
Writers often waste words rather than perfecting their prose.
A simile, as our fourth-grade English teachers intoned, is a comparison of two, usually dissimilar, objects, with the use of “like” or “as.” To enliven our writing, similes can evoke the particular sense we want to transmit. Many of our most now-trite similes were fresh when first used—Burns’ “my love is like a red, red rose,” Shakespeare’s “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” But repetition and endless assignment in freshman English classes has made them as shopworn as the bargain table after a sale.
So we all know that typos are the worst! Terrible! They eat babies! They are AIDS! Etc, etc.
Now that that disclaimer is out there, there are some typos that I secretly love. And those are the ones that (unintentionally) completely change the meaning of the sentence because they end up being a totally different word. Those can be hilarious.
We’re all familiar with similes and metaphors, right? These can be great ways to infuse your writing with some punch and visual pizzazz. However, sometimes in the process of getting that metaphor written down, something happens, and the plane that was supposed to quickly and efficiently connect the object of your description and your metaphor ends up going all Oceanic Flight 815 on you and crashes somewhere on a remote island where weird things happen and you’re trying to get rescued, but have also kind of resigned yourself to the fact that you’re way off course and no one will be looking for you.
In other words, the last part of the previous paragraph is something you generally don’t want to do. I’m not aware of a specific literary term for a rambling or forgotten metaphor, but you generally want to avoid them.
One of my all-time favorite movies is The Usual Suspects. I could watch it on a loop, and I’d still never get sick of it. If you haven’t seen it, I’m going to spoil the ending, and if you keep reading and get mad at me, it’s your own fault because that movie has been around since 1995 and you really should have seen it by now.
The vast majority of the movie is Kevin Spacey’s con man character telling a cop about a job that results in a huge explosion and lots of deaths. He says the mastermind behind the job is a man named Keyser Soze. At the end of the movie, we learn that Kevin Spacey is Keyser Soze, and a good number of details from the story that he told the police were made up from things he observed in the cop’s office.
The first thing your brain does after it picks itself up off the floor is get confused: Wait—if he made up those details, what other bits of information did he make up? Was anything he just told us real? Is Keyser Soze even real?
And just like that, the movie that was so straightforward for the first 100 minutes is suddenly a completely different movie.
