brilliant similes

alfa beta

You know what one of the best bit about 'creative writing' is for me?

It's hitting upon a simile that really works.

It's a real rarity and when it happens it's just something to savour.

I wrote a story a while back where the first line ran something like:

'Her words floated in the perfumed air like petals gently blown from a beautiful flower'

I loved that line at the time and I still do.

Similes are tricky. There's no doubt. The minute you use 'like' or 'as' in a sentence you know that the whole image you're trying to convey will fall or stand on the next few words.

And when it falls, it fall's badly.

So - what's the best and worst you've come across?

Here's some stuff to start the ball rolling.

The first is from one of my favourite poems ever, TS Eliot's J Alfred Prufrock and I dunno what it is about it, but it's just awe-inspiringly good:

"Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherised upon a table"

Love it!!


Here's a little extract from Stephen King's 'On Writing'

When a simile or metaphor doesn't work, the results are sometimes funny and sometimes embarrassing. Recently, I read this sentence in a forthcoming novel I prefer not to name: 'He sat stolidly beside the corpse, waiting for the medical examiner as patiently as a man waiting for a turkey sandwich.' If there is a clarifying connection here, I wasn't able to make it.

My all-time favourite similes come from the hard-boiled-detective fiction of the 40s and 50s, and the literary descendants of the dime-dreadful writers. These favourites include 'It was darker than a carload of assholes' (George V Higgins) and 'I lit a cigarette [that] tasted like a plumber's handkerchief' (Raymond Chandler).


Finally, if you google 'worst simile', this list pops up all over the place - It's dressed up as a collection of bad similes drawn together from high-school essays, but one glance through them and you'll realise that these are written on purpose by very very good writers. Some are absolute classics tbh...

Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the center.

He was as tall as a 6′3″ tree.

Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.

John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

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.

Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.

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.

The lamp just sat there, like an inanimate object.

McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

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 dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

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.

Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.

Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth.

He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River.

Even in his last years, Grand pappy had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it hadrusted shut.

He felt like he was being hunted down like a dog, in a place that hunts dogs, I suppose.

She was as easy as the TV Guide crossword.

She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.

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.

“Oh, Jason, take me!” she panted, her breasts heaving like a college freshman on $1-a-beer night.

It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.

It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.

He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

The politician was gone but unnoticed, like the period after the Dr. on a Dr Pepper can.

Her eyes were like limpid pools, only they had forgotten to put in any pH cleanser.

Her date was pleasant enough, but she knew that if her life was a movie this guy would be buried in the credits as something like “Second Tall Man.”

The thunder was ominous-sounding, much like the sound of a thin sheet of metal being shaken backstage during the storm scene in a play.

The red brick wall was the color of a brick-red Crayola crayon.

She caught your eye like one of those pointy hook latches that used to dangle from screen doors and would fly up whenever you banged the door open again.

Her pants fit her like a glove, well, maybe more like a mitten, actually.

Fishing is like waiting for something that does not happen very often.

They were as good friends as the people on “Friends.”

Oooo, he smells bad, she thought, as bad as Calvin Klein’s Obsession would smell if it were called Enema and was made from spoiled Spamburgers instead of natural floral fragrances.

The knife was as sharp as the tone used by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) in her first several points of parliamentary procedure made to Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) in the House Judiciary Committee hearings on the impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton.

He was as bald as one of the Three Stooges, either Curly or Larry, you know, the one who goes woo woo woo.

The sardines were packed as tight as the coach section of a 747.

Her eyes were shining like two marbles that someone dropped in mucus and then held up to catch the light.

The baseball player stepped out of the box and spit like a fountain statue of a Greek god that scratches itself a lot and spits brown, rusty tobacco water and refuses to sign autographs for all the little Greek kids unless they pay him lots of drachmas.

I felt a nameless dread. Well, there probably is a long German name for it, like Geschpooklichkeit or something, but I don’t speak German. Anyway, it’s a dread that nobody knows the name for, like those little square plastic gizmos that close your bread bags. I don’t know the name for those either.

She was as unhappy as when someone puts your cake out in the rain, and all the sweet green icing flows down and then you lose the recipe, and on top of that you can’t sing worth a damn.

Her artistic sense was exquisitely refined, like someone who can tell butter from I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.

It came down the stairs looking very much like something no one had ever seen before.

Bob was as perplexed as a hacker who means to access T:flw.quid55328.com\aaakk/ch@ung but gets T:\flw.quidaaakk/ch@ung by mistake.

You know how in “Rocky” he prepares for the fight by punching sides of raw beef? Well, yesterday it was as cold as that meat locker he was in.

The dandelion swayed in the gentle breeze like an oscillating electric fan set on medium.

Her lips were red and full, like tubes of blood drawn by an inattentive phlebotomist.

The sunset displayed rich, spectacular hues like a .jpeg file at 10 percent cyan, 10 percent magenta, 60 percent yellow and 10 percent black.

kieslowski

I must say I prefer the Bard's attitude to the simile here alfa beta...

SONNET 130

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.