Comparisons Aren’t So Odious

What makes for good literary style? The components are so numerous that it would take all day to list them, but one that jumps out at me is description that is vivid and original.

Vivid and Original

Vivid: It engages your senses until you can really see, hear, taste, smell, and feel the scene the author has laid before you. In fact, she hasn’t just laid it before you. She has drawn you into it.

Original: She has expressed herself in ways that are not stereotypical, that create wholly new ways for you to think about the scene, used descriptors that are so new that you’ve never thought of them before, but dang, now that you hear them are perfect.

Comparison

One splendid tool of vivid and original descriptions is comparison. Correlating the thing described with something else (perhaps better known but not necessarily) that shares certain characteristics. Let’s consider the two basic kinds of figure of speech that set up a comparison for us:

Similes express comparisons using “like” or “as.”

When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie (from the song ) It’s amore.

Metaphors imply comparisons, where one pole is said simply to be something else or is given properties of something else.

The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas. (An unforgettable line from Alfred Noyes’ poem, “The Highwayman,” which has loitered in my subconscious                       since childhood.)

Take Your Pick

Now, I’m not an English teacher, so I can’t give you rules about when one is better than the other to use. I can only invoke The Law of the Reader’s Ear. Sometimes one sounds better/seems more appropriate than the other. In a popular song like It’s Amore, the overtness (dare I say in-your-faceness?) of a simile seems appropriate. A pizza is big and round, like the face of the moon. It is, moreover, an Italian thing, which strengthens the Italian feel of the whole song. That’s an important issue to remember.

In Noyes’ poem, the mood is more serious and literary. A bandit in love is about to be captured and killed. The idea of a galleon caught in a storm is appropriately ominous (shipwreck coming!), and the adjective ghostly evokes death. No reader, except perhaps a visitor from another planet, is likely to think the moon is really a ship, but it passes through the sky as if it were sailing, and the clouds around it resemble waves and shores. Good enough.

There’s that even more oblique kind of metaphor, too, which attributes properties of one thing to another in order to compare them. I’ve already salted the text with a cunningly hidden example. Did you spot it? I said a line from a poem has loitered in my brain for years. People loiter, hanging around doing nothing particular, eventually making others feel uneasy. So this expression compares a line that won’t go away to a loiterer. Not great art, but it makes my point.

Checklist

Are these examples vivid? Are they original? The pizza pie moon is so much so that it becomes humorous, and that’s intended. The galleon moon is sinister and beautiful at the same time. It creates an immediate picture and, although others may have compared the moon to a ship, the particularity of the detail here strikes me as original. Success for both!

Homer, of course, is famous for his extended similes. He inserts lines — long mini descriptions of comparanda. This sort of digression is more typical of speech than of writing (his poems began their lives as oral), but don’t be too quick to rule it out of prose. Here’s a shortish example from the Iliad:

Just as dense clouds of bees pour out in endless swarms
from hollow rocks, in clusters flying to spring flowers,
charging off in all directions, so from ships and huts
the many clans rushed out to meet, group after group.

Because the author has more time to develop it, a Homeric simile is very vivid and original. You could try condensing it into fewer words and still get the basic comparison.

Handle With Care

One last observation. The more precisely apt the comparison, the better. Remember the Italian vibes of the pizza simile which so well suited it to an Italian-themed song? It wouldn’t have been nearly so effective if you had said “like a big frisbee.” And to start out “The Highwayman” by saying “The moon was a pizza sitting on a cloudy tablecloth” would have cracked your readers up rather than had them biting their knuckles. To compare shadows to a black flow of lava draws attention to the fact that they seem to swell and fill corners as time passes and the sun moves. To compare them to obsidian dramatizes their sharpness and translucence.

It all depends on exactly what you want to say!