We all have a tendency to reach for those first-thought comparisons. We fall back on the phrases we know or the phrases that make natural sense. He’s sleeping with the fishes. They buried the hatchet. Or the ever classic, “You’re my knight in shining armor.” Too often our comparisons end up halfhearted, cliché, and less than effective. Take “You sly dog” for an example. In a culture with no true association of dogs and slyness, the attempted metaphor conjures an indistinct image, and the phrase becomes meaningless extra words. Or consider “ruby red lips.” “Red” provides no more information than “ruby,” and proves itself superfluous.
What is the solution to stagnant description? Hunt for unobvious imagery. Connecting your ideas to entirely unrelated images that both spark a similar emotion will provide you with striking imagery, showing the same feeling from two different angles.
A classic example of avoiding the obvious is found in Edmund Rostand’s play Cyrano de Bergerac about a masterful poet with a massive nose and a talent for making enemies. A frustrated courtier trying to embarrass him says, “Sir, your nose is … hmm … it is … very big!” Cyrano responds, “Very … Is that all…? Ah no, young man! That was a trifle short! You might have said at least a hundred things by varying the tone.” He proceeds to give the courtier nearly twenty such examples.
Descriptive: ’Tis a rock, a peak, a cape, a peninsula!
Curious: What is the purpose of that large container? Do you keep your pens and ink in it?
Dramatic: When it bleeds, it's like the Red Sea!”
Simple: Is that monument open for public viewing?”
Rustic: Is that thing a nose? No, it must be a dwarf pumpkin, or a prize watermelon!”
Apart from diffusing a difficult situation, Cyrano pinpoints this characteristic of excellent prose. All of his imagery sheds a different light or a greater understanding on the size of his nose. By comparing his nose to objects with no direct resemblance, he creates stronger images. If he had said, “Your nose is like an elephant’s,” if would have been less effective, because he would still be tying himself to the confines of the nose category. By stepping outside this box, he opens up a new world of expression.
Another example of unexpected imagery can be found in the poetry of Jack Gilbert. In his poem “Adults,” he writes, “The sea lies in its bed wet and naked/ in the dark.” He combines a play on words with strong personification, and you can feel the timbre of the work after one line, far more than if he had begun with “It is dark and the sea is wet.” He follows this line with “Half a moon glimmers on it/as though someone had come through/a door with the light behind.” By tying his setting to different specific situations, Gilbert creates a specific feeling in his readers. The images he ties in are not directly related to the sea, but the emotion they evoke is in line with the tone of the poem. He skips the obvious and cuts straight to metaphors that will draw out emotion in his audience and put them in the right headspace for where he takes them next.
Metaphors correlate, and your job as an author is to shepherd people in connecting ideas they thought were totally disparate. Strong imagery gives words to feelings we thought inexpressible. Gilbert writes in his poem “What to Want” of a man who has lost everything, “He was finally alone … /A wind blowing through/where much of him used to be.” With that metaphor, his emptiness is palpable.
Don’t fall into the trap of comparing anything to something it closely resembles. Delve deeper and dare to describe more fully.
Callie Johnson works as Editorial Assistant at Kelli Sallman Writing and Editing with a bachelor’s degree in Theatre Arts and Creative Writing from Calvary University. She previously interned with Kelli for two years, working as proofreader and copyeditor on several manuscripts. Her strange obsessions include kerning, East Coker, and the sound of cows chewing.