If you’re anything like me, you hope in your heart of hearts that your writing will reveal a Great Truth to your readers, that it will open a doorway to compassion and understanding that will ripple out to change the world. Ah!
The authors who have been most effective in ushering me to that doorway are those whose writing reveals connections between images, ideas, and sensations I otherwise would have missed. Like Annie Dillard’s terrific simple line:
The air bites my nose like pepper.
How did Dillard come up with such a lively sentence, one that bridges two physical sensations (cold and biting) and scent (pepper)? Does she own a magic wand of concision and beauty?
I’m betting she doesn’t have a magic wand, but that she does have a keen eye and a willingness to play around with making similes, comparing unlike sensations until she hits on a transformative combination. Patience and persistence in crafting similes pays off when our writing glimmers with their magic.
Caution! Clichés Are Stale Similes
A danger inherent in similes is that their overuse leads to bad magic: cliché. Looks like a drowned rat. Hot as hell. Tough as shoe leather. These comparisons have been made so frequently that they’ve become meaningless.
No reader slows down to wrap their head around what a drowned rat actually looks like. Pause to imagine such an unfortunate creature. Pretty wet and soggy, right? It’s a great image—but one that no longer registers with readers.
Which is why a new simile can magically transform writing.
Is simile the same as metaphor? Nope—although both are considered figurative language, a metaphor only suggests a comparison between disparate things. It’s an indirect connection, such as the trees waltzed in the breeze. That trees could be like dancers is implied by waltzed.
Jane’s hair is like a mound of pale blue cotton candy. Because this isn’t a common or overused comparison, it avoids cliché.
And notice what else happens: by comparing hair to an artificially colored sweet treat, the writer gives the reader visual, textural and flavor sensations. On a subconscious level, many readers in western cultures will likely also associate Jane with a fair or street festival; there’s a good chance it’s a pleasant association.
And thus with one simile, the writer has planted multiple layers of association in the reader’s imagination. Magic!
The Key to Fresh Similes
So how do we write fresh similes to enrich and deepen our writing?
Because effective similes compare dissimilar things, like visual images with sounds, I made myself a crib sheet of the senses in combination with each other. I try work my way through it on a monthly basis, as a regular part of my writing craft practice.
For example, one of my current protagonists is, in my mind, quite short. So I compare this visual sense with all the others, and I share these in part because they do not all work! This is what playing around looks like for me.
She’s as short as a one-ring wrong number. She’s short as a mouthful of vanilla meringue. She’s short as the soft belly fur of a seal pup. She’s short, like spring’s tangy aroma of wild onions.
This is my crib sheet:
Sight -> sound, taste, touch, smell
Sound -> sight, taste, touch, smell
Taste -> sight, sound, touch, smell
Touch -> sight, sound, taste, smell
Smell -> sight, sound, taste, touch
Another approach I’ve been inspired by was presented by Bret Anthony Johnston’s craft exercise in Now Write! edited by Sherry Ellis. This version is a fill-in-the-blank method—I’ve included a couple starter suggestions below—but the principle is the same: compare unlike senses.
Her face was purple as the smell of _____.
The symphony felt like _____.
In July, the sidewalk tasted like _______.
When he got under the hot shower, his hair sounded like _____.
Because I’ve found simile-making often uncovers different levels in my writing, I recommend playing around with similes that are grounded in the topic(s) of a current project. If you’re writing about rocks, compare the way rocks look with sound, taste, touch, and smell. Invent some fill-in-the-blank starter sentences that address your topic.
Be as specific as possible when you play; “skunk” is more likely to trigger a response in readers than “stinky.”
And when you give a character dialogue that includes a simile, consider their life experiences, and how those will inform their comparisons. An eighty-year-old retired bank robber will compare different objects and senses than a twelve-year-old skateboarder.
Vanquish Procrastination With Similes
I find my playtime with similes to be flat-out fun and an easy antidote to every writer’s occasional or regular bouts of procrastination. On the days I’m avoiding my desk, I tell myself: five similes about your current piece. Just write five similes.
More often than not I’m surprised or intrigued by what emerges as I play with simile, at which point I re-perceive my current piece. Just as similes open doors for our readers, so they may open our writing practice. Ah.
Have you ever read a simile that resonated with you and stuck in your mind? Let me know in the comments.
PRACTICE
Set your timer for fifteen minutes and work through as many sense-to-sense comparisons as you can using the crib sheet above. You can use the topic of your work in progress as a place to start, or write similes about the things you experience as you walk along the beach.
If you have extra time on the clock, complete the four sentence starters I’ve given—and invent some specific to your work in progress!
When you're done, share your similes in the comments below, and leave some thoughts on your fellow writers' comparisons, too.
Oh wow, I’m the first in the queue … I’m going to list similes I have used in my salty seventy years. Some of them are original, some borrowed from anonymous. Careful mammas and pappas, the language might get a touch earthy.
1. When referring to very strong coffee: Whoa, that’ll make ya walk straighter than a broke dick dog. (First sergeant walking into the orderly in the morning.}
2. When listening to a 90 man chorus lock a barbershop seventh chord: Like a warm blanket of sound that wraps you in goose bumps.
3. Another one on barbershop harmony: like chocolate candy, that just melts in your ear and sounds delicious.
4. Older male seeing his profile in a mirror: A bowling ball on two legs.
5. A teenager’s first shave: Smooth as a babie’s bottom.
Wonderful! Particularly like the Barbershop Harmony simile.
Oh those baby bottoms! They are so smooth they invite lots of comparisons. Thank you!
First-your prompts and then mine. . . Her face was purple as the smell of sour three day old beer.
The symphony felt like the soft tickle of grass on my feet in early spring.
In July the sidewalk tasted like burnt pizza cheese on my tongue
When he got under the shower his hair sounded like the Hallelujah Chorus of the Messiah
And now for my similies.This was fun!
Her belly was as rounded as as the sound of perfect pitch.
The chorus tasted like the melding flavors of rich olive oil and summer fresh tomatoes.
Her touch smells like lavender and vanilla.
His speech tasted like bitter greens.
Thanks for the challenge.
“Her belly was as rounded as the sound of perfect pitch.” I’ve read and enjoyed this sentence a thousand times. Maybe that’s an exaggeration, but still. It’s pretty cool
Thank you Ariel! Your “Amish kid in the night club” gave me a fantastic visual. Quite effective.
Perfect pitch is such a joy to hear–I’m imagining an equally perfectly rounded belly. Nice.
That touch-fragrance one is so evocative 🙂
Thank you. Wasn’t this exercise fun?
Definitely
Fun! No judging, I wrote these “in-character.” Or, in multiple characters.
That outfit was as dissonant as rice pudding and sour kraut.
Your mom’s kisses were like a childhood prayer—really comforting, but then long gone.
I smelled that…it’s as obvious as an Amish kid in a night club.
Ew, I don’t eat processed meat. It’s as gross as whatever trash they play on the radio these days.
My dog’s bark gets under my skin. Like dirty pillows on your clean face.
I’m intrigued by the processed meat-radio trash one. They’re both a mishmash of less-than-desirable parts.
Haha you know, I didn’t even realize how well that fit. Thanks for the comment!
What a great name you were blessed with.
🙂
I love the dirty pillow similie, and found the child’s prayer similie really compelling and touching
I will just work on the examples for now…
Her face was purple as the smell of a school gym locker room.
The symphony felt like a whole flock of pigeons, all cooing at once.
In July, the sidewalk tasted like the floor at a camel auction.
When he got under the hot shower his hair sounded like a mosquito
humming Dueling Banjos!
The idea of mosquitos humming “dueling banjos” is *quite* compellingly annoying!
Annie Dillard is good! In her book, The Living, in writing about fatal accidents, she used the phrase “the pointy glance of heaven.” Ouch!
I already play this ‘game’ and love it!
My favourite sentence in any novel is in Markus Zusak’s THE BOOK THEIF. He’s describing a happy, spring day in the life of the book thief, and after expounding upon sunshine and laughter, he writes:
“And the sky was the colour of Jews.”
(Referring to the thickening black smoke bleeding from a not-too-distant smokestack.)
The sentence hit me as hard as a two-by-four and I doubt that S day goes by when I don’t think about it.
In a previous novel of my own, I wrote:
“The sky was the color of pain,” and while I still like the imagery, I think Markus’ sentence is brilliant. It never leaves me.
Love,
Jesse.
http://www.jesseleighbrackstone.com
That is a tremendous sentence. It works for me because it is a horrific, stomach-churning image. And, if I’m not mistaken, it’s a metaphor rather than a simile, since it’s equating one thing (the color of sky) with another, dissimilar thing (Jews). Similar in structure (not content) to “the trees danced in the wind.” Which is also what is happening in the Annie Dillard phrase, “pointy glance of heaven” that Joanna Morefield cites below 🙂
Metaphor or simile, I’m unsure, Lesley, because the blackening sky is literally seeded with the ashes of burning Jews, so Markus is describing reality in a particularly poignant manner. It’s the contrast that makes it so effective, I think. One moment we’re reading about summertime, childhood innocence, and nature, and the next we’re starkly reminded of the death cloud hovering o’er their heads. Have you read that book?
By the way, ‘The pointy glance of heaven’ does nothing for me. Perhaps if I read it in context….
Love,
Jesse.
http://www.jesseleighbrackstone.com
Hey Jesse, I did read THE BOOK THIEF, years ago while I was traveling in Germany, actually. Your observation that part of the power of the sentence is its sharp contrast with the context of summertime and childhood is spot-on, IMO.
I’m going to write a post about metaphors later this year, and I’ve been mulling your thoughtful point about how the sky being the “color of Jews” is describing a sky with the ashes of Jewish people. I don’t think of “Jews” as having a color, though of course ashes do, but then Markus didn’t say “the color of the ashes of the Jews” or “the color of the sky was like the color of the ashes of the Jews,” he pared it down to the (powerful) “color of the Jews.” Quite a wallop of a sentence, as I think we’ve already agreed 😉
I am not a grammarian!, but my copy of “The Little Brown Handbook” states that a simile is “an explicit comparison, using ‘like’ or ‘as’ between two unlike things” . . . so I don’t think, technically, it can be a simile.
I agree.
Here’s one of mine:
‘Shards of muted yellow light stretched out across the lake, like groping fingers searching for some frozen thing to warm. Perhaps it was him: he needed it.’
From the TIME & UNFORESEEN OCCURENCD seven-novel series.
http://www.jesseleighbrackstone.com
I’d love to hear if/how those two sentences affect you.
Love,
Jesse.
Another one, off the cuff, so to speak.
‘The cutting words felt like glass in his throat, as he exhaled them.’
From reading both the article and Jessie Leigh Brackstone’s comment below, it is clear I have no idea what a simile is. A quick online search gave me the following definition and example:
“A simile is a figure of speech that makes a comparison, showing similarities between two different things. Unlike a metaphor, a simile draws resemblance with the help of the words “like” or “as”. Therefore, it is a DIRECT COMPARISON. [Emphasis mine.]
We can find simile examples in our daily speech. We often hear comments like “John is as slow as a snail.” Snails are notorious for their slow pace and here the slowness of John is compared to that of a snail. The use of “as” in the example helps to draw the resemblance.”
[from literarydevice.net/simile]
While “slow as a snail” is admittedly cliche, It does at least compare two slow things. To write something like “John is as slow as cheesecake” only registers as nonsense in my brain. Perhaps that is one of the hazards of being over fifty.
As for Brackstone’s “favourite sentence,” the simile there (if it is a simile; it uses neither “like” nor “as,” although it doesn’t seem to qualify as a metaphor, either.) is both a racist and a stomach-turning image. Sure, I can write shocking, but that is not the sort of writer I aspire to be. At least now I know I don’t want to read “The Book Theif.”
Sir, I sure understand your distaste for the sentence in that book, The Book Thief. I watched the movie; it did not have that line. It was a powerful and sad story. Even if I had read that line, I don’t think it would have been my take away. Sometimes the language which we use to discuss something ugly is, well….ugly.
And knowing how long it takes to bake a cheesecake (my recipe calls for turning off the oven after an hour of baking and letting it cool in the oven for up to four hours), I wonder if “John readies himself as slowly as a cheesecake bakes” might work. Though the author would have to be confident that their readers would “get” the reference, and it would be most believable if the character/narrator making this simile had been established as a careful baker. And of course not everything we come up with makes sense–but that’s part of the fun, IMO.
Disclaimer: I’m terrible at writing similes, so I tend to avoid them most of the time in my own fiction. As a reader, however, a good simile can add a lot to a description and help show instead of tell.
One question though. What’s the consensus on when an author uses too many similes? I feel like any more than one or two per chapter can get distracting.
This is a great point–it’s my preference for writing to serve the story, not call attention to themselves (though I also realize language that “distracts” is part of the point of some writing!), and reading my drafts aloud is the way I find out when language (similes included) are pulling energy from a piece. That said, if you read Lorrie Moore: she has similes on more pages than not in many of her stories, and they ALL work (again, IMO). Rules, made to be broken!
I’m not good at making similies, but I’ll give it a try, on my own for the moment. Im reading other members’ posts to have an idea.
I can’t wait to try writing similes.
Like Bruce Carroll, I find that too much simile or metaphor is, well, too much! My editor chooses the best ONE in a short piece, and tosses the rest. Here is my favorite from my latest submission:” Smitty’s laugh slithers like a viper in the sun, birthing a worm of fear.”
I find it’s always more effective to pare down to the “best” of the bunch than to struggle to generate one that’s “perfect” — which is why I enjoy generating lots of ridiculous-seeming things and then culling. Love the worm of fear, too!
I love similes, however I think the writer has to be careful – too many and they lose their cleverness or beauty. I also feel the writer should be mindful of the word picture that simile is painting in the reader’s mind. Some similes are so odd, that they’re almost off-putting with the picture they conjure up. Do that too many times and your book is going to laid aside and the author labeled weird.
Totally agree. They’re for fine-tuning and enhancing writing. Subtle brushstrokes, not bloody cudgels.
Thank you for this, great way to linber up my writing brain, and give some ideas to work with for my upcoming project; A fiction inspired by my very real experience with hyperemrsis gravidarum.
She looked like the acid bitterness of one too many vomits
She looked like the stiffness of a day old pizza crust
She looked as sour as the scent of crushed lemons
The sound of her dry heaves was like the person running for the bus that had already left the stop, desperate yet futile.
The sound of her head weakly collapsing on the pillows was as soft as warm water landing on your tongue
The echo of the tearless sobs that emitted her body …felt like the gentle flutters of an unborn baby.
…felt as raw as salt entering a wound
Wow! I love them, specially the last one.
Oh, that stiff pizza crust 🙂 I feel that way today.
Soon we’re moving to the city center, and our little red apartment by the sea will be just a memory. I want to remember it. Inside it’s white, like the soft and serene quiet of a farmhouse at dawn. I always wanted an all-white home, but wasn’t sure if it would make me feel like I were living in a cloud that smelled of plumeria, or a stark, emotionless room used to steal the imaginations of all its inhabitants. I can say confidently that my white apartment, with its white roses, white heating units, white curtains, and white windowsills, is like being surrounded by the innocent, unapologetic simplicity of beauty; a space that is confident in and content with itself.
We have a large off-white rug, dirtied by the rough footsteps and parties of its previous owners, that’s taken refuge in our space for the time being. It perfectly rounds out the contrast between the white walls and the wooden floors, acting as a softened mirror of rippled water that reflects white and light up into our home. But it gathers dust and lint the way a child shoves melting candy into an old pillowcase on Halloween. Impossible to keep clean and yet impossible to give up, the rug is like a stray puppy that
There is a smell about the apartment, always a new one coming from a different place, but a smell nonetheless. I’ll be sitting at the table and catch a sudden whiff of something unpleasant, like a light green cloud of concentrated waste that floated slowly around the room and finally made its way to my nose. That’s my cue to take out the trash. Other times, I catch the sharp tang of slimy water clogging my nose, as if the washing machine hadn’t quite drained all the way and the puddle that was left had given up the ghost and quickly began rotting. Other times still, I’ll come home and find the warmth and pleasantness of a smell that can only be described as the feeling of being hugged by a kindly, plump woman who might have just baked cookies, or, home.
We will miss this little red apartment by the sea.
An evocative piece — I’m smiling as I read it — and drawing up sensations of unpleasant smells (which trash and puddle-rotten water are for me) gives me a sense of “whew! I’d be glad to be out of that apartment!” rather than triggering a sense of sorrow or loss . . . but then the last scent that’s brought in, of the just-baked cookies and then “or, home” provides a start contrast. Interesting!
“All
the stalls are vacant, so I go to the one farthest from the front door. The heaving
and tears release in full force. My chest hurts like the sun trying to rise in the
morning when I don’t want to wake up for school.” Is this a simile?
Comparing the chest pain to the sun trying to rise is a simile; does it work for your character and your readers is the next thing to consider. Comparing dissimilar things (which I think chest pain and the sun rising when one doesn’t want to go to school are), can show interesting connections, or they can confuse/seem nonsensical. It all depends on what the writer is “going” for . . .
This is my first attempt at a simile. School is where I was going with this simile later. She attempts to leave her comfort zone but ends up in a situation she cannot control.
Ah, I think I understand a little bit better what you’re trying to do here. Since the character’s going to be leaving her comfort zone, and wind up in a situation beyond her control, perhaps play also with similes that compare pain to elements of movement, change, chaos. Keep playing! Keep writing!
Cant say a word! Urgh! I kept on going back and read this ten times already but I can’t decipher a good way of stating a simile. Any one can teach me how or where to start?
I’m fun of writing an essay on any topic thought I could use a simile in one of those topic but darn so hard to start and place it on my column. I think this is the part where I am struggling and going back to the post for me to get some ideas.:(
Shared! But struggling, 🙂 Just kidding mate, just trying to cheer up myself.
Cheers,
James
https://wedoessay.com
Just try to be descriptive mate. Instead of using typical or overused expressions, try describing something on your own feelings, taste or view. Using your own senses will make it original and will avoid clichés altogether. Just like what the author said “willingness to play around”. It does not have to be strict. Just describe it on your own words.
My favorite simile is from Raymond Chandler: He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake