tooth soup

photo credit: ilmungo

As I was

sitting at the Perth Writer’s Festival today, listening to Eleanor Catton read aloud from her book The Rehearsal, I noticed that she used simile to great effect in her setting of scenes and characters. That got me to thinking (egotistically) about my own writing and how often I thought I might use the same device. So as soon as I got home this afternoon I browsed through my little catalogue of writing, especially the last half-a-dozen or so pieces I had produced, and found to my surprise that not one of them, not one! used a single instance of the word ‘like’. Not even ‘as’ was used comparatively, there was a complete absence of simile in my work. ‘Okay then,’ I thought, ‘what about metaphor? Surely I’ve got some metaphors tucked away in there?’ Alas, no. There wasn’t so much as a single comparison throughout the entire bodies of six separate pieces*.

This comes as a bit of a shock to my system. Simile and metaphor are supposed to be the building blocks of imagery. So am I devoid of interesting imagery? Should I be concerned? Should I try and incorporate at least a few likenings in my work? When I query Google the term ‘writing without similes’, Google promptly returns with a quiz of it’s own: ‘did you mean writing with similes?’. Not exactly the most encouraging of responses. Seems I’m on my own here with trying to decipher why on Earth I don’t gravitate towards the use of similes and metaphor in my work.

One possible reason could be that of familiarity, and the expectation of the same in my readers. For example, I tend to write pretty commonplace scenes–offices, homes, streets–and so I don’t feel that a lot needs to be compared in order to bring an image of a street, home, office into the mind of the reader. But that doesn’t let me off the hook, as while scenes can be ubiquitous characters are often products of the imagination of the writer, and their motivations and actions need to be compared to something in order to be given context and realism.

In any case, this sort of illustrates the power of reading and hearing other people read their stories. If you don’t get out there and see what’s being done, you may never have realisations such as I had about your own work. So I guess my advice would be to hit up some workshops or writer’s groups (or festivals) in your area and see what others can show you about your work!

—

*Perhaps the clichéd title of this post is an additional reason why I stay away from similes. :P

No related posts.