Similes. I love them. I love them like a mild Maydaybank holiday by the coast. I love them [controversial statement coming up] much more than I love metaphors.
Metaphor gets all the good press. And yes they are the summit of poetic achievement. A good metaphor will open the imagination and let the writer march through carrying the flag of literature high. A good metaphor can contain new worlds, new universes, new infinities. A good metaphor will get you bags of marks from the cynical GCSE examiner marking online paper after paper - praying for something original to appear on the thumb marked screen in front of them.
But I prefer a simile.
I'm thinking about them because I've been looking at ways of improving my GSCE pupils' original writing - and immediately I thought of similes. They are, in some ways, the most efficient way of making your writing stand out. They can be a simple way of making something look less than simple.
The strange thing is that - in my experience - pupils learn more from looking at the crazy similes than the good ones.
"the effect of drinking a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like having your brains smashed out with a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick" The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
A good simile can make you happy in a way that metaphors can't. It may lack the emotional intimacy of a metaphor, but I've never been all that big on that touchy feely crap anyway. I want a sentence to make me smile; and no smile is as effective as a simile smile.
"She's a charming middle age lady with a face like a bucket of mud" Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler
Even a bad simile will give you a feeling like the joy you get from eating an ice cream while watching the mid-summer sun setting over Portstewart Prom. And if you're Raymond Chandler, a bad simile can even make you a heck of a lot of money.
Don't believe me? Let me prove it. Here are some student penned similes that teachers have submitted online (and a couple I spotted myself over the years). Tell me they don't make you feel you feel good about life.
Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.
She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.
He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.
He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the danger of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.
Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.
Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.
She had that look on her face, like when you disagree with the judges on BGT.
The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.
The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.
He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.
The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.
It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.
She gave me a disappointed look, like a nun who was very disappointed in me.
He moved slowly and painfully, like a C2K computer loading an "educational" maths game.
Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.
He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.
He was the size and shape of a man much bigger then him.
He feel for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River,
The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law George. But, unlike George, this plan might just work.
He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.
Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
Mostly stolen from the winners of the Washington Post Style Invitational Bad Simile and Metaphor Contest, Mentalfloss.com, and the Huff Post.
