As writers, we’re always searching for the most effective ways to get our points across without bashing our readers over their heads with what we’re trying to say. Yes, we try to write “simply,” but we’re writing simply about complex subject matter, and this requires a little more work, sometimes, than just writing down what we mean. This is a generalization, of course, and one that does not apply to all writing. But I write literary fiction, and I find this to be true in the novels and short works that I choose to produce. Using metaphors, similes, analogies, and aphorisms in your fiction are great ways to perk up your writing. If you write fantasy or romance, YA or suspense, mystery or any other genre, these literary devices can elevate your fiction to that next level of intrigue and professionalism.
So, let’s define what each of these literary devices really mean.
Metaphor
A metaphor, which is also known as a direct comparison, stands in for something else. It’s a representative that takes the place of the thing you’re really talking about. Metaphors are meant to create an analogy between two objects or actions. They make things more interesting. Josip Novakovich, in the second edition of Fiction Writer’s Workshop, says that a metaphor “can make us see something in a way we never have before; it can make us wonder, break out of our habitual ways.” Metaphors stick out because they make us think. We feel like we’re experiencing a little bit of magic somehow, that we’re using our brains a little more than we might normally use it (thanks to the author’s distinct perspective, which seems, somehow, a tad more creative than our own).
Here are a few metaphors from songs and literary works, many of which I’m sure you already know:
Love is a battlefield (Pat Benatar)
I’m a riddle in nine syllables (Sylvia Plath)
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun (Shakespeare)
Hope is the thing with feathers—that perches in the soul (Emily Dickinson)
The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places (Hemingway)
Chaos is a friend of mine (Bob Dylan)
Words are but the signs of ideas (Samuel Johnson)
Simile
Similes are rhetorical devices that compare two things directly. Similes use words like “so,” “as,” “like,” and “than.” I tend to find a lot of similes are used, unfortunately, as clichés: “as quiet as a mouse,” “as fit as a fiddle,” “as cool as a cucumber.” Like any literary device, it’s up to you to come up with a new one. I know that’s a difficult ask, but you’re a writer, and that’s our job—to make our readers see things in different ways. As opposed to analogies, similes tend to use concrete images for abstract concepts.
Examples of similes:
Big as an elephant
Swim like a fish
Shine like a diamond
As dark as night
Your smile is brighter than a thousand stars
Blind as a bat
Fighting like cats and dogs
They’re two peas in a pod
You’ve seen all the above, probably more in speech than as text. When you’re writing, challenge yourself to come up with new similes. I find that taking a well-known simile (such as “fighting like cats and dogs,” and seeking out a different way to say the same thing. For me, having an example makes the process easier for me rather than trying to come up with a new one from scratch. I’m not that clever. As the saying goes, good writers borrow, great writers steal!
A metaphor “can make us see something in a way we never have before; it can make us wonder, break out of our habitual ways."
Josip Novakovich
Fiction Writer's Workshop
Analogy
An analogy is when you compare two things to clarify or explain something to the reader. The two things you’re comparing are alike in one way or another. It allows your readers to get a better picture of what you’re trying to communicate. Aristotle said, “If the eye were an animal, sight would be its soul; for this is the eye's substance – that corresponds to its principle.” That’s a complicated example of an analogy, but most analogies aren’t that hard to decipher. Peter De Vries, comparing the unknowable universe to a safe, wrote, “The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe." We get the point pretty quickly, don’t we? Analogies can use metaphors and similes to more effectively explain how two things are similar, defining both more accurately by comparing them.
Here’s a great passage from Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being with analogies (Kundera, like Kafka, are literary superstars in Prague). I read Kundera’s novel while pursuing my TEFL certificate in Prague a hundred years ago. Kundera also uses metaphor in this passage. Use Kundera’s paragraphs to help perk up the analogy machine in your brain (I have italicized the analogy portion of the passage):
“He kept recalling her lying on his bed; she reminded him of no one in his former life. She was neither mistress nor wife. She was a child whom he had taken from a bulrush basket that had been daubed with pitch and sent to the riverbank of his bed. She fell asleep. He knelt down next to her….
He had come to feel an inexplicable love for this all but complete stranger; she seemed a child to him, a child someone had put in a bulrush basket daubed with pitch and sent downstream for Tomáš to fetch at the riverbank of his bed.”
Aphorism
I think aphorisms are my favorite literary device. They are short. They are succinct. And when you read them you feel like you’re cracking a nut you didn’t even realize existed. For me, they are a wow moment, a shooting star captured by the author of a work and transformed into a sentence that sticks out because you haven’t heard it before, at least not in quite the way the author has been able to present it. Oxford Languages says an aphorism is, “a pithy observation that contains a general truth, such as, “if it ain't broke, don't fix it.” Aphorisms can also use metaphor and imagery to get its point across.
Examples of aphorisms are:
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely (Lord Acton)
Don’t judge a book by its cover
Live to fight another day
It is not possible to step into the same river twice (Heraclitus)
If you lie down with dogs you wake up with fleas
You made your bed now lie in it
Give him enough rope and he’ll hang himself
There are many other literary and rhetorical devices available to you as writers. There’s anaphora, hyperbole, anadiplosis, anastrophe, alliteration, meiosis, euphemisms, and more. Before you start writing your next piece, or maybe now that you have the first draft of a new novel or short story, research some literary devices to see how you can utilize them to enhance what you’ve already written. Literary devices are like Christmas ornaments on your Christmas tree—they make your writing sparkle and give it that extra something something that your readers will remember long after they’ve finished reading your work.
Cully Perlman is an author, blogger, and Substantive Editor. He can be reached at Cully@novelmasterclass.com
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