Kimberly's Timbering Limberly Similes

Damn, boy... 2700.... that's freakin' great. And even if you feel like it's a mess it's still a lot of pages... I'm sure there's some salvageable stuff in there.

I think it's great that you got up and went for it yesterday morning and then went surfing... I bet you were flying high the rest of the day.


We'll call her Kimberly (cuz it goes so well with "simile").

I think she wrote her manuscript and then went back through the whole thing after deciding she was going to insert a simile in each paragraph. Many (many, many, many) paragraphs have two, sometimes three similes, back to back, within the same sentences. It wouldn't be so painful if they carried the story, or the theme, or the mood, or the setting, or something. But they are just random paint splotches that have nothing to do with what's going on in the scene.

For example (and I don't want to direcly quote anything, for fear of being mean) I'm complaining about her overuse of similes. I'm angry. I'm frustrated. I still have forty pages left of her flowery writing before tonight's critique group meeting. If I were going to insert a literary device right now I might say her similes were crawling all over her pages like fire ants, biting my fingers every time I turned the page. Now that's not all that creative. In fact, it's kinda stupid, and I only took a half second to pull it out of my ass.... but AT LEAST it has something to do with the feeling, the message, the tone... whatever... it has something to do with what's going on in the paragraph/page/scene.

She goes off with stuff like... her similes pop off the page like billions of turtle-fart bubbles rushing to the surface of a secret pond in the middle of a forest. Yes... she's that extreme... Actually, I think I'm being conservative in my example.

I always feel like my writing is lacking in this regard. I often think about going back through, looking for places where I should "insert literary device here," make sure to provide a prescribed balance of metaphor, simile, alliteration, etc... But I read stuff like Kimberly's and I think, maybe I should just be happy when, during a long writing session, I lean gently to one side and squeeze the occasional juicy metaphor/simile out from between my buttcheeks. Sometimes I'll sit there in that stinky little cloud that has been inserted into my writing, and I'll think, "Cool... that little metaphart really visualizes that feeling... it makes it come alive for the reader."

God, the pain... I've been picking up this manuscript of hers every couple of nights, forcing myself to do twenty pages here and there. It's that bad. Part of me wants to tell her... uh... sorry, lady, I just don't think you've got it, not here, not this, probably not nothin' no time... but I never will. Even if they were right, if someone did that to me I would die. And I don't want to kill anyone, like a happy clown might with a steak knife, stabbing its victim over and over again, like a happy child playing whack-a-mole at a carnival, while the carny guy running the booth looks on, a look of horror twisting his face like a washcloth soaked with sweetened condensed milk.

(all brilliant similes above copyright Steve Lamott, 2007)