Similes/Metaphors in prose

Read these quickly, making a note of any you like, or any you think don't work in prose.

1. "He cranes himself nearer without moving either of his feet - looks increasingly like a ski jumper leaving the slope that will take him up inside thin air: that big downward slide that looks proper mad when you see it on the telly" (A.L. Kennedy)
2. "He sailed in on a sea of excuses" (Polly Samson)
3. [The dealer] "had the look of someone who might have debated wearing a cowboy hat to hawk his goods, but was persuaded out of it by a sensible person aware of cowboy hats and what they could do to a man's reputation" (Nicole Flattery)
4. "black as a sleeping whale" (Polly Samson)
5. "the sun rises like yeast from the bowl of the mountains" (Polly Samson)
6. "The morning's just-visible moon pulled the sea an inch inwards as if for a waltz" (Eley Williams)
7. “[the fenicular carriages are] built at an angle, like the dipping hat of someone who doesn't want to be recognised” (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
8. "He looked as if he'd been poured into his clothes and someone had forgotten to say 'stop'" (G.K. Chesterton)
9. "The road was very bleak, wandering like the handwriting of a dying person over the hills" (Richard Brautigan)
10. "The washing piling up like nasty thoughts" (Tobias Hill)
11. "grass sprouts from the rafters of the Big House now, like hairs from a pensioner's nose" (Caitriona O'Reilly)
12. "with such long legs that he looked like the afternoon shadow of somebody else" (Dickens)
13. "[a voice] like an English lesbian preventing some rude tribesman from maltreating a donkey" (William S. Burroughs)
14. "Individual snowflakes are dropping past the window like fluffy paratroopers" (Katherine Heiny)
15. “The big willow down by the river thrashes with outbreaks of silver, upturned leaves like startled fish that can't escape” (A.L. Kennedy)
16. "Puking like a fruit machine" (Joseph O’Connor)
17. [She sees a white carrier bag flapping] "like a happy ghost" (Nikki Gemmell)
18. "the couple next to me ... are snogging so furiously that they could have dived for pearls since they last drew breath" (Jane Costello)

Now list the factors that influenced your decisions – are they funny? True? Distracting? Puzzling? Cliché? Purple prose? If they don't work in prose, could they work in poetry?

Some people keep a list of similes that can be added to stories. I keep a list of half-similes. Here are a few of them

• like feeling for a pulse
• like the silence after a story’s read at a workshop
• like an arsonist lingering in the growing crowd of spectators
• like a password you have to change
• like phonelines across a busy road

Interpretive frames

Everything you understand is received within a context. The context may be very general, but it still has an impact on interpretation - for example in an English context if you read the word kind you're unlikely to think that it means "child" in German, even if you know both languages. The context may be social (the expected behaviour at a funeral isn't that of a wedding). It may be quite specialised, though it uses words/images from wider contexts ("sheafs" in maths, for example). To understand something it may be necessary to first identify the context - before you can understand a story it helps to know whether it's for infants or adults, for example.

With some things, their context is intrinsic - text written in English looks like English; Abstract Expressionism looks like Abstract Expressionism. At other times, the observer needs to work out the context. Artists/poets/comedians may exploit that uncertainty. For example, a realist story may turn surreal. The observer may not want to play along with the game, or may be unable to. Someone unfamiliar with Surrealism may dismiss the later part of the story as unrealistic, normalising it as a dream, or a character gone mad.

These contexts go under various names - "interpretive frames", "discourse contexts", "genres", "language games". In conversation, the context can be fluid, but there are settings where there are "rules" to follow. At an appointment between a GP and a patient for example, a patient is expected to react to the doctor's invitation to informality, seeing it perhaps as an indication that there's nothing seriously wrong. The GP on the other hand might be trying to extract a less inhibited description of perhaps significant symptoms from the patient. The patient may try to keep the conversation light, knowing that you're not supposed to spoil the mood by giving bad news.

A feature of painting and sometimes poetry is that there are many schools/genres - overlapping, contrasting, etc. A painter may go round a gallery looking at the paintings and think that being a painter is enough to understand paintings, but until a painting's genre is identified, the meaning may be hard to interpret. A naked body needs to be interpreted differently depending on whether it's Religious Art or Impressionism.

How is someone new to Art expected to know all the genres? Dare one open one's mouth? It depends on the language game you're playing. If you're going around a gallery on a first date the rules will be different to if you're being interviewed for an Art College application. It helps to be aware of some genres/contexts but inevitably you won't know everything. And anyway, aren't some of the genres silly - Emperor's New Clothes?

In literature I think some modernist writing poses problems. Readers don't notice that there's been a shift of context, that the language game has changed, that the discourse frame is different. They think that because they're good with language in one context (writing novels, for example) they have transferable skills, but recognition of frame/context-changing may not be one of them.

How can one identify a context switch? I think in conversation we're alert (often subconsciously) to these nuances of register change - to how they're signalled and what their purpose is. In a text it's sometimes signalled by the use of italics or a paragraph break though sometimes there are sudden, unannounced context changes without there being body language or voice inflections to help. Eliot's "The Waste Land" is challenging -

And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the archduke's, My cousin's, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter. What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images

Suppose you didn't know that there were languages other than English. Line 2 wouldn't be identified as a language-switch, it would be nonsense - a misprint. But there are other switches here too - rapid changes of register (changes of intimacy, intensity and voice). Bakhtin suggested that poetry is marked by heteroglossia, which perhaps what this is.

I suspect that in writer's groups there's more of a variety of language games than in many other situations, and the switches are more sudden. Orwell's advice was prose style should be transparent, that you shouldn't be distracted by the language, but apparently he was in favour of The Waste Land (in principle anyway) and was obsessed for a while with Ulysses, more upset by its lack or political awareness than by its obscurity. I think that many prose pieces can still be read (by non-deconstructionists) as if language were like clear glass. However, I think much modern poetry (and especially discussion about poetry) requires an acceptance of the "play" (looseness) of language and context, of the (possibly) uncertain context affecting the meaning of words, of the context being retrospectively changed.

Magazine survival

What little theatres are for actors, little magazines are for writers - you have to start somewhere. UK paper literary magazines have been struggling for a while. The Arts Councils sometimes support them, though the councils' aims and objectives change over the years. e-publications and web magazines (often short-lived) have made readers reconsider their subscriptions. Rising postal charges, especially when sending abroad, have hit hard. While subscriptions have plummeted, submissions have soared.

In the States, magazines have been struggling too. Unlike here, many of them are based at universities, which protected them to some extent. But now that universities are strapped for cash and Mr Trump has slashed NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) funding, even some of the top ten impact publications are on the brink. The Paris Review lost $15,000 in funding. One Story had $20,000 terminated. These may not sound like huge amounts of money but magazines survive on a shoestring.

Some paper magazines have become Web-only with mixed results. For some, the reputation that their paper issues built up over decades hasn't carried over to the web version. And whereas paper issues might be archived for posterity by libraries, web versions are less reliably archived (the British Library store a few).

Why don't more magazine editors give up? It's a labour of love (the excitement of discovering new talent), and who knows, a fairy godmother might suddenly appear. "Poetry", a Chicago magazine that started in 1912, battled on for years. They rejected several poems by a Mrs Ruth Lilly. In 2002 she gave the magazine about $100 million.

Workshop critiques and variety

An updated version of this article is on Litrefs Articles

Text versioning

When I write computer programs I use a free system (git with vscode) that with a click lets me save and recover versions. I can create branches - the diagram on the left shows how, from the bottom, a file evolved, splitting into branches then mostly merging. I can compare versions side-by-side, the differences colour-coded.

It's possible (I haven't done it, but I've seen it done) to analyse the development of a text, colour-coding the lines according to age or number-of-changes.

With a click I can back-up to the cloud (free - github). In my will I can leave the instructions to make the back-up visible to all. Nothing's lost - even my mistakes.

I could use the same system for poems/stories too. Already I have long/short versions of a few poems. Because of the various word limits for prose, I have 3 versions of a few texts. One recent short piece had so many UK/US issues (gear-sticks, supermarket trolleys) that I keep 2 versions of it. But I'd be most interested in watching how a story develops - which paragraphs changed the most? which paragraphs never changed? when were the growth spurts? (I think there's often an initial one, then I fiddle around, then I realise what the story's about and quickly add many more words).