Dominic Leung’s Reviews > The Book You Need to Read to Write the Book You Want to Write > Status Update

Chapter 10 - Description - Metaphors and similes

Also, metaphors and similes can be particularly useful when you want to pin down and illuminate vague or abstract matters.

Chapter 10 - Description - Metaphors and similes

Whenever a simile or a metaphor presents itself, stop and search it at the door. If it seems comfortable and familiar send it packing and look for somehing more interesting. Ideally, a metaphor or simile should be both apt and surprising, enhancing your reader's understanding of its primary subject by showing it in a new and interesting light.

Chapter 10 - Description - Metaphors and similes

Metaphors are, by definition, not to be taken literally, but they don't exist independently of the literal. It's important to keep in view the literal meaning of your metaphors, examining each detail in relation to the others and thinking carefully about the overall effect.

Finished chapter 10 - Description - Cliches

If we don't, we need to develop what Hemingway called 'the writer's radar.' 'The most essential gift for a writer,' he maintained, 'is a built-in, shockproof shit detector.'

Finished chapter 10 - Description - Cliches

So we have to steer a careful path between the fancy formulations that obscure our meaning and the convenient expressions that render our meaning in ways too obvious and familiar to be interesting. We should know when our descriptions are tired and worn, and we should know when they're unhelpfully elaborate.

Finished chapter 10 - Description - Cliches

One has to respect cliches: they are sturdy so-and-sos. They endure because they are true and because they work; they are useful little devices that we all understand. Yet the term is deroatory, and no serious writer wishes to be accused of cliched writing. There's often something depressing about a cliche, preecisely because it's not saying anything new.

Finished chapter 10 - Description - Preconceptions about style

We should learn to recognise when we've written something that has no function in the text other than to show off what good or clever writers we think we are: we have at this point stopped communicating with the reader (which is our job) and started to indulge ourselves (which is a weakness).

Finished chapter 10 - Description - Preconceptions about style

Literary language for most writers is - everyday speech, but a shapened and intensified version of it; it may also be necessarily difficult at times because what it has to convey is itself inherently difficult. As in all matters related to writing we're looking for balance, we need to be on our guard against dull plain-speaking as aginst over-ingenuity.

Finished chapter 10 - Description - Preconceptions about style

The more difficult phrase isn't merely unnecessary, it actually reduces the impact of the sentence. If your writing will send your readers on a detour before they get your meaning, or even prevent them getting your meaning at all, having put the book down in bafflement or to consult a dictionary, they may not return to it.

Finished chapter 10 - Description - Preconceptions about style

Early-stage writers often seem to mistrust their own voice, perhaps imagining that there must be a voice more appropriate to literature: when they think of what they want to say they try and find some more elaborate way of saying it. But there's no reason to make something more complicated than it needs to be.