Let’s Talk Process: Cliches and Similes
- Cold as ice
- Golden as the sun
- A stitch in time saves nine
- High as a kite
I could go on. Feel free to add your favorites in the comments.
Why is she sticking cliches and similes together in one entry? you may be asking yourself. Or not. Probably not… *Ahem*. Right. I am including them both in a single entry because cliche and simile are frequently linked writing devices (frequent, not “set in stone” or “in steel” or blah blah ad nauseum but hopefully proving my own point). Life-partners, if you will.
Metaphor rides solo because of its complex and variable nature and the difficulty rating of crafting a decent one. I’ll get to metaphor at some later date. When I can write a decent one.
Cliches and similes are the opposite of metaphor vis a vis skill level. They are, with the exception of very rare cases, shortcuts. Devices. Which doesn’t mean they have no use at all; it simply means they should be used judiciously. Himalayan pink salt rather than Morton’s, if you will (see? Clearly not metaphor qualified yet).
There are few things more off-putting than burying oneself in a great book only to hit a cliche/simile pairing (or either individually a great deal of the time) with a massive, painful splat. I can forgive them, maybe, if the person uttering them is someone’s bubbie, doling out bon mots while adjusting her babushka, but outside of that, a cliche pulls the reader (okay, fine, me) out of the story and slaps me across the face with what I like to call “sudden lack of give a shit.” But only in my head, because no one’s bubbie likes that sort of language.
(Uh oh. Image via method home.com)
If a writer says her character is, “as beautiful as Helen,” say, we know she’s beautiful but we don’t know anything about her. I don’t give a crap about what Helen looks like or the ways in which she’s beautiful unless I’m reading The Iliad. Helen is Helen. “Homer” went through a lot of trouble to make her up and he did it for very specific reasons.
You (writer) have gone through the trouble of developing your characters. Sweat, blood, tears, insomnia, stolen moments. Don’t short change her by comparing her to someone a million other people have compared their characters to. Respect the work you’ve done. Draw comparisons, by all means, but make them specific. Give the reader references that help them visualize and understand, not a quickie in the backseat. Drawn the reader in instead of keeping her at a distance with tired, burned out phrases.
Avoiding too many of these cliche/simile pairings (or cliches or similes) will also help you avoid the “telling instead of showing” crap (yes, I am aware this is a cliche. Bite me). A writer can tell the reader (again, in this case, me) a character is “angry” or “sad” or “happy.” This means very little to me in the context of the story because without guidance in how those emotions manifest in different characters, I’m going to foist my own personality and emotional tendencies on your character. You know, the one you worked really hard to create? I’m not going to know who she is, so I’m going hand her my baggage and make her walk to the long term lot. Connection is good, of course it’s good. Engaging. More engaging, though? Depth. Dimension. Believability. Even if your character is a giant purple blob. Trust your reader a little. Trust that from “red in the face, fists clenched, fingers tangled in her hair, chewing on her fingernails until they bleed,” I’ll get enraged. And if she does go red, I doubt it will be “red as a tomato or purple as an eggplant.” Human faces don’t turn that color. They could, however, “bloated, bruised purple highlighted by the crimson tracers in what used to be the whites of her eyes.”
Not what she’s like.
What she is.
Give each of your characters his/her fifteen minutes. They deserve it and so do you.
That’s how I do it, kids. How about you?
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