Writer's Fallout Shelter

Hi, Lori,

Here's an exercise you can try, geared toward coming up with one of the most trying things of all writing, coming up good metaphors, similes, and descriptions. Get ahold of a smattering of magazines: wrestling, guns, decorating, rolling stone, anything, any category, the wider the range the better. Keep them in a pile, and each day look through a few pages, working from front to back, one magazine a day, dog-earing it to keep your place. Do not skip anything, and especially do not skip the ads. Look at the images and jot down what you see. Do not worry about an overarching context, do not worry about the grammar. Stick these phrases into a file and call it your simile and metaphor file. Often, in fact almost constantly, you'll come across an interesting photo of a person, or of a person doing an odd thing (especially in the ads). Write the descriptions as you see them, and again do not worry about the grammar or a larger context as you do this.

I swear by this. Here's some examples to show you what I'm talking about:

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If you look at this month's issue of National Geographic, there is a photo in the first few pages of a gigantic boulder situated near the edge of what looks like a deep chasm. This makes for an excellent simile:

Like a boulder balanced on the edge of a precipice.

No context, but there it is, a good simile, filed away, to be used someday in an actual scene, maybe.

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In a computer magazine there was an editorial comparing the inside parts of a computer to car parts, saying that just as a car cannot have torn hoses, leaky valves, and blown gaskets, a computer's internals have to be in good shape. This becomes a good metaphor:

Everything under the hood had to be perfect for this to work. There could be no loose logic, leaky guesses, or blown conclusions.

Again no real context, but the general idea is encapsulated and filed away.

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Sometimes a good description comes to mind. Photos of people in magazines are rarely bland. In one magazine there was this ad that had a full page photo of a sumo wrestler. His head looked like it was attached directly to his shoulder. No neck was visible at all. He was gigantic. Just writing what I saw, I came up with this:

He had no visible neck, as if that part of his body was missing, his large head seemingly connected directly to his sprawling shoulders. A massive chest, his pectoralsl folded over with slabs of fat that met his equally immense belly. Supporting his huge bulk were legs like tree trunks. This is what it must be like to face down a sumo wrestler, he thought. Or a human version of godzilla.

Not especially grammatical, but grammar is not the focus here. The elements of the description themselves are the focus. It was simply looking at the photo and writing down what I saw.

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Here's a description from the black and white photo of a man in a back issue of Wired:

In his fifties, thin windblown hair, bags under glassy eyes, a gray, semi-circular mustache shading his small mouth, thin lips. A close-cropped beard covered his chin and neck like a thin layer of moss.

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You know that "Got milk ad"?

She took a sip of the hot chocolate, and when she lowered the cup from her mouth, some of the whip cream was lathered across her upper lip.

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If you do this on a daily basis, you will be training your mind to think up interesting similes, metaphors, and descriptions, using images such as ads, which are expressley designed to envoke enticeing analogies. Put Madison Avenue to work for you ;) And also read the articles, because they add to your circle of content.

Ed