Fifty-Six Of The Best (Or Worst) Similies Ever Written

The following list, which comes from two contests held by the Washington Post, is not new — in fact, it’s been making the internet rounds for a while now — but you’ll never get tired of reading it:

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

2. He was as tall as a 6′3″ tree.

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

4. 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.

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

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

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

8. 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.

9. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

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

11. 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.

12. The lamp just sat there, like an inanimate object.

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

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

15. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at asolar 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.

16. 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.

17. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

25. She was as easy as the TV Guide crossword.

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

27. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

28. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

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

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

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

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

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

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

35. 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.”

36. 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.

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

38. 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.

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

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

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

42. 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.

43. 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.

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

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

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

47. 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.

48. 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.

49. 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.

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

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

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

53. 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.

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

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

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

(Source)

Climax: Bringing Together The Essential Components Of A Novel

A good novel consists of four primary components, all of which interact in an almost symbiotic way. Those elements are plot, character, theme, and style.

(The recapitulation of theme-and-plot combined is what I call The Situation.)

Of those four components, the first three are primarily concerned with subject-matter, and the last — style, which is the most complex component of all — is concerned with presentation.

Presentation is The How of art.

Style = how.

At root, all artworks consist of two basic elements: subject and style — i.e. the what and the how.

There’s what you present (a love affair, a battle, a contest, a sunset) and there’s how you present it (clearly, dryly, concisely, sprawlingly, strangely, beautifully).

The Who — and I’m not speaking here of the band — are the characters. They’re part of The What.

These elements are brought together by the climax.

Climax is that point near the end of your story whereupon everything you’ve been building toward comes together at last in an explosion of activity.

Climax is a sub-division of plot, and it marks the beginning of the end of your story. Climax is culmination. It is resolution.

A good resolution will invariably leave the reader feeling satisfied.

Climax is the point at which your characters and their conflicts are resolved.

Remember this: the greater the struggle, the better the plot, the more satisfying the resolution.

The climax of Raiders of the Lost Ark is when the Ark of the Covenant is finally opened. That is an example of a climax that delivers well.

The climax of Star Wars, which is also a satisfying climax, is when Luke Skywalker destroys the Death Star.

A good climax resolves all conflicts that the writer has developed throughout the course of the story. When Chekov gave his famous advice — “Never hang a shotgun on the wall in the first act if you don’t intend for it to go off in the third” — he was speaking partly of climax, and here he spoke correctly.

A poorly constructed climax is one that does not resolve the conflicts. David Lynch’s movie Fire Walk With Me is an example of this.

Anticlimax is a minor or inconsequential event after the climax that doesn’t flow naturally from the climax and thus has no logical necessity to the plot. Anticlimax is a flaw: it is bad writing. For example, if in the first Rocky movie, Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed had begun haggling over their purse after the fight (which is the climax, and a very good one at that) this would be an example of anticlimax.

(Sidenote: the term anticlimax has developed a secondary meaning: when the climax or punchline doesn’t deliver or isn’t satisfying — usually because the means by which it’s done are painfully trivial.)

Often I’m asked how best to go about the business of novel writing. It’s a difficult question to answer, in part because there’s so much that goes into the process, but one of the most useful pieces of advice I’ve discovered is this:

When you’re building a plot, come up with your climax first. If you can construct a climax that brings all your characters and their conflicts together, you can in essence write backwards from that point. (By that I don’t necessarily mean you write chronologically backwards, although I have known writers who do exactly that.)

The reason I think this is so useful is that if you have a solid climax, you’ll always be dramatically safe. You’ll still make errors along the way — if, that is, you’re anything like me (heaven help you) — but if your climax is sound, those errors can easily be fixed in the revision process, and your story will live.

Characterization (Part 3)

Characterization is a presentation of the personality of the people who populate a story.

Characterization is primarily a depiction of motivation and motive. The reader must understand what makes the characters act in the way that those characters do.

It’s been said that one of the truest tests of good literature is when you can discuss the characters as if those characters are actual people: when you can psychologize over them, talk about their strengths, their gifts, their shortcomings, their personalities, their deeds, all as if these people are real.

To create such a character — which is to say, to create a truly convincing character — the writer must first understand what motivates the people he or she is creating. By that I mean, the writer must have a fully formed idea of what the character’s premises and personality are. After which, by means of the plot (i.e. the action, which includes each passage of dialogue), you proceed to present the character’s motives and (in turn) their personalities.

Know what motivates your characters.

In this way, each element of a story is interrelated: character depends upon plot, which in turn depends upon theme, the successful presentation of which depends upon style.

One of Shakespeare’s greatest living admirers (and arguably the world’s best-read human being), the critic Harold Bloom (not to be confused, as he so often is, with that hack Howard Bloom), honestly believes that in creating so many convincing characters, Shakespeare went far in creating our modern-day conception of humanity itself. It is an incredible statement, and yet I, for one, won’t argue it. In Harold Bloom’s own words:

“Shakespeare, who at the least changed our ways of presenting human nature, if not human nature itself, does not portray himself anywhere in his plays.”

Even more interestingly, perhaps, Mr. Bloom goes on to say this:

If I could question any dead author, it would be Shakespeare, and I would not waste my seconds by asking the identity of the Dark Lady or the precisely nuanced elements of homoeroticism in the relationship with Southhampton (or another). Naively, I would blurt out: did it comfort you to have fashioned woman and men more real than living men and women? (Harold Bloom, Genius, p. 18).

Good Stories, Unoriginal Plots, Timeless Themes

There are 32 ways to write a story, and I’ve used every one, but there’s only one plot: things are not what they seem.

- Jim Thompson.

Anthony Burgess was even more stringent: he put the number of possible plots at about five.

So what distinguishes one plot from another? Or, to put that question more specifically, if two writers write the same plot, how if at all will those stories differ?

In fact, no two stories can be written exactly alike, and one of the reasons for this is the writer’s style. (“The most interesting story is always the story of the writer’s style,” said Nabokov.)

Styles are more diverse than fingerprints, and how the writer tells a story discloses exactly how that writer thinks.

Stories consist of several elements, the most fundamental of which is plot — plot being the skeleton upon which the rest of the story (characters, theme, descriptions) all hang — and ultimately what determines the differences in stories, even those with similar plots, is the depth of style, the depth of theme, and the seriousness of the approach.

Literature, for example, is distinguished from popular fiction by the seriousness of its themes and by how well the writer not only grasps but also conveys those themes.

Theme is the core meaning that the events of a story add up to — e.g., the theme of the movie Quiz Show is honesty.

In essence, literature conveys the importance of human life.

Plot is the means by which this is done.

There can be good plots with shallow themes (certain soap operas, for instance), and there can be good themes with poor plots (like the novel Light Years, by James Salter). But in either case, a theme cannot be clearly or convincingly conveyed without a good plot and a strong writing style.