Ivan Doig and James Lee Burke are two great authors. One reason is the way they use figurative language to enhance their stories, which probably explains why Ivan Doig’s This House of Sky was nominated for the National Book Award and James Lee Burke has had a series of Best Sellers in the New York Times.
Imagine a world so literal that we wouldn’t read lines like “The pitcher’s mound at Wrigley Field swelled up from the field grass like the back of a giant tortoise into a dark green sea, and on top of it, he was pitching as wobbly as if the tortoise had the hiccups.” This comes from Doig’s This House of Sky The simile breathes energy into what might otherwise have been a flat description.
Although I don’t live by this rule when writing drafts, during revisions I make it a point to include figurative language in my work as often as possible. I keep an eye out for the best places to swipe something.
Lucky for us, the figurative language family is a big one. The characters that populate this family are alliterations, metaphors, similes, onomatopoeia, personifications, hyperboles and idioms.
Alliteration is the repetition of a single letter of the alphabet such as ‘Peter Piper picked up a peck of pickled peppers’.
Metaphors compares two different things. A simile is like a metaphor. The only difference is that similes are used as, as and is like and metaphors are not. ‘His elephant smile was blinding’ is a metaphor. ‘She had a bright smile like an elephant’ is a simile.
Onomatopoeia uses a word or words that sound like the thing you are referring to as ‘the air taken out of the tire’.
When you make something that isn’t human appear to have human abilities and reactions, it’s impersonation. The trees danced to the music of the wind. Trees don’t dance. The wind does not make music.
‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away’ is an example of hyperbole, where a point is emphasized using sometimes amusing exaggeration.
An idiom is a group of words that are different from the ordinary way of saying things like ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’.
Used correctly, figurative language adds to your fiction and can be a way to create an image or convey a point in an interesting and powerful way.
“He watched her because she disappeared into the leafy shade of the grove, the leaves flickering like a thousand green butterflies in the breeze.” This is a simile of James Lee Burke’s Swan Peak.
We grow up with figures of speech, so our heads are filled like a Thanksgiving turkey with tasteless language, which English teachers call clichés. The challenge for most authors is to stay away from those tired clichés. This language has been used so many times that it gets boring because so many people have heard or used it. In fact, if you use a well-known, well-worn cliché on the first page of your novel, your book could have a half-life numbered in seconds as the rejection slip arrives in the mail.
In My Splendid Concubine’s, I used figurative language in a flashback to help describe Robert Hart as an old man long after the love story that takes place in the novel. Robert looked in the mirror and saw the reflection of a man who resembled a giant sea turtle with his head protruding from his protective shell. His eyes had deep lines of sadness etched around them like a parched floodplain scarred by ancient catastrophes.
If you’re unfamiliar with clichés, one way to avoid writing them is to use a program like Editor from Serenity Software to proofread your draft during revisions. Although Editor does more, it also recognizes worn language. After that, it’s up to you.
To write a powerful figurative language requires a great imagination. The best way to build an imagination is to read. Studies and brain scans show that people who watch too much TV or spend too much time surfing the virtual world have pebbles for imagination instead of mighty ancient redwoods.
