On Highs. And Lows.

Friday 6 May 2011

I want to kick off this week's post with some humor (swinging you through a "high," if you will).

For years, I have internally debated the worth of analogies in writing. Some writers write great analogies that smoothly convey a picture. Other writers force analogies, and these analogies serve to do nothing but make the writing more clunky (anyone ever read Tom Robbins?). And the tough part is: Sometimes you do not know whether an analogy is good or bad until someone tells you - that is to say, "Sometimes you think an anaology is top-shelf, until someone asks you what bargain basement the analogy came from."

We might all have different opinions on the risk/reward ratio of anaolgies. But one thing we can all agree on: The following analogies are awesome. Not that anyone would be wise to use them...but they are awesome.

Awesome bad analogies

These come from an old piece in the Washington Post, for which they asked high school teachers to send in some of the worst analogies they had come across in their students' papers. Here are some of my favorites.


* He was as tall as a 6′3″ tree.

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

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

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

* 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.

* 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* 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.

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

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

* 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.

*


[change of topic: onto Highs and Lows]

A couple years ago, I ran into an old friend of mine from high school. He asked me how writing was going.

He was drunk.

I told him I was really excited, because an agent had recently told me she loved the sample pages she had read of The Great Lenore, and had asked me to send her the full manuscript.

He interrupted me with this: "Dude, don't get so excited about something like that."

"Um."

"That's not even a big deal, man. I mean...you're gonna get published and, like, win awards and sell tons of books, dude. Don't get so excited about the little things."

And...you know what? I went home and wrote down what he had said.

Yes, he was drunk. Yes, he didn't really know what he was talking about. But he also spoke the truth.

When we get too high about the little things in the publishing process, we also set ourselves up to get too low when things don't go our way.

We should have goals much greater than "Getting an agent to read our manuscript" or "Getting our manuscript published."

The greater your goals are, the more it keeps things in perspective. The "landmarks" become exactly that - landmarks that mark your journey to the goals you plan to achieve. And the setbacks become nothing more than minor roadblocks you need to push out of your way.

Keep things in perspective, Dear Writer. Keep focused on the goals down the road.

Don't get too high.
Don't get too low.

Keep writing.
Keep reading.
~J

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