A Guide to Similes vs. Metaphors - Freewrite Store

A Guide to Similes vs. Metaphors - Freewrite Store A picture is worth a thousand words. It’s an old saying that means you can convey a lot of information with a single image.  As a writer, you generally don’t have the benefit of imagery to go along with your words, so instead, you need to find simple and effective ways to paint vivid mental pictures for your readers. Ideally, you want your writing to be richly descriptive without using long-winded explanations. One way to do this is with the use of similes and metaphors. Both are ways of describing something by comparing it to something else, but there’s one subtle difference: A simile is when you say something is like something else. A metaphor is when you say something is something else. The best way to understand each method is to examine some examples. Similes â€Å"All at once he sprang into jerky agitation, like one of those flat wooden figures that are worked by a string.† (from Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad) Remember those toys? Their limbs had joints at the shoulders, elbows, hips and knees. One pull on the string dangling down from their back would cause their arms and legs to fly in all directions. By applying this mental image to a human body, you can clearly picture the action that Joseph Conrad was describing. â€Å"By this time Scarlett was boiling, ready to rear like a horse at the touch of a strange rough hand on its bridle.† (from Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell) Margaret Mitchell could have said â€Å"Scarlett was very angry,† but by comparing her to an easily-startled horse, she has conveyed the explosive nature of the emotion simmering just under the surface, ready to burst out at the slightest provocation. â€Å"The guinea pigs, awake and nibbling, were making a sound like that of a wet cloth rubbed on glass in window-cleaning.† (from Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis) Anyone who has cleaned a window knows the distinctive noise that comes from the friction of a damp cloth on the glass. This quirky simile makes the sentence much more interesting than if Sinclair Lewis had merely said the guinea pigs were squeaking. â€Å"I had no choice but to hobble like an off-balance giraffe on my one flat, one four-inch heel arrangement.† (from The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger) The use of a giraffe in this simile is perfect because it’s so easy to picture its long, gangly legs, and the way that a baby giraffe struggles to control its limbs when it first gets up after being born. As you can see from these examples, the object that the writer uses as a comparison is something that is easily identifiable to the reader, and that creates a distinct mental image, engaging the reader’s memory and imagination. Metaphors â€Å"Life is a highway.† (from the song by Tom Cochrane)â€Å"Life is a rollercoaster.† (from the song by Ronan Keating) Obviously, life is not actually a highway or a rollercoaster, but both these metaphors convey the fact that life is a long, twisting journey that has highs and lows. Both highways and rollercoasters conjure up images of adventure, excitement, fear, elation, beginnings and destinations. They’re both something that you travel on, and they present you with diverse experiences along the way. For comparison, the movie Forrest Gump contains the famous simile, â€Å"life is like a box of chocolates.† â€Å"Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra, and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath.† (from Matt Groening, The Big Book of Hell) While comparing love to a snowmobile crash might seem an unusual metaphor, it’s an effective one. It’s suggesting the rush and the exhilaration as you speed across the snow is much like the joyous out-of-control feeling when you fall head over heels for someone. Then, before you know it, the shock of commitment hits and suddenly you feel trapped. â€Å"Mr. Neck storms into class, a bull chasing thirty-three red flags." (from Speak by Laurie Anderson) While Mr. Neck isn’t really a bull, the imagery of him acting like one is highly evocative – wild eyes, flaring nostrils, huffing and puffing, each of his thirty-three students a red flag causing his rage. â€Å"‘Life,’ wrote a friend of mine, ‘is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.’† (from A Room with a View by E.M. Forster) If you’ve ever listened to a novice violinist, you’re probably familiar with the painful screeching noise that often accompanies their early attempts at music. The violin is notoriously hard to learn and can take many years to master, but the results can be glorious if you put enough work in, which makes it an excellent metaphor for life. â€Å"What light through yonder window breaks? It is the East, and Juliet is the sun!† (from Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare) No, Juliet is not a flaming ball of gas. The sun definitely is – but it’s much more than that. It’s the source of all life. It provides solar energy to feed plants which in turn feed other creatures and create oxygen. It governs the water cycle in our atmosphere. Without the sun, we’d cease to exist. And that’s how Romeo feels about Juliet. She is everything to him, and he cannot survive without her. William Shakespeare could have used a simile and said that Juliet was like the sun, suggesting she was radiant and beautiful, but that would have been much less powerful. How to use similes and metaphors Sophie opened the back door and stepped into the garden. It was hot and humid. Now, let’s use a simile and a metaphor to describe the same event. Simile: Sophie opened the back door and stepped into the garden. It was like walking into a sauna. Metaphor: Sophie opened the back door and stepped outside. The garden was a sauna. Either method works well and is more interesting than just stating it was hot and humid. The simile and metaphor both encourage the reader to recall the feeling of entering a sauna – the oppressive, close, muggy heat that makes sweat trickle down your back without evaporating. When you’re using similes and metaphors, there are a few things you need to avoid: 1. Awkward Comparisons If you say, â€Å"the smell hit me like falling rock†, it sounds awkward because a smell is not a physical object, and because smells don’t drop from the sky. 2. Overused Cliches A lot of similes and metaphors are clichà ©s, and these should be used very sparingly. A few examples: Dead as a dodo Stubborn as a bull Quiet as a mouse Raining cats and dogs The calm before the storm 3. Mixed metaphors A mixed metaphor is where you combine two or more incompatible metaphors, often with ridiculous results. â€Å"Sir, I smell a rat; I see him forming in the air and darkening the sky, but I'll nip him in the bud.† (attributed to Sir Boyle Roche) â€Å"Yes, you just like to play the cool Will Truman while I'm all the intense crazy one. Well, once the bowling shoe is on the other foot, look who's the good cop and look who's the bad cop.† (Grace Adler from Will Grace) â€Å"'I don't like it. When you open that Pandora's box, you will find it full of Trojan horses.† (Ernest Bevin, Labour Foreign Secretary) 4. Overuse Like all good things, similes and metaphors should be used in moderation. If you’re using several per paragraph, that’s probably too many. Use them conservatively for maximum effect. That's everything you need to know about when to use metaphors vs. similes in your writing.   Do you have a metaphor or simile that you are particularly proud of?   Let us know in the comments below!         About the author: Claire Wilkins is a freelance copywriter and editor from New Zealand. She loves to write about travel, health, home, and proper punctuation. After a career in financial services spanning almost three decades, Claire left the corporate world behind to start Unmistakable - her writing and editing business. She creates website copy, blogs, and newsletters for creative agencies and small businesses, and  specialises  in polishing existing content until it shines. In her spare time, Claire enjoys cloud-spotting, singing in the car and editing video.

42 Must-Read Feminist Female Authors

42 Must-Read Feminist Female Authors What is a feminist writer? The definition has changed over time, and in different generations, it can mean different things. For the purposes of this list, a feminist writer is one whose works of fiction, autobiography, poetry, or drama highlighted the plight of women or societal inequalities that women struggled against. Although this list highlights female writers, its worth noting that gender isnt a prerequisite for being considered feminist. Here are some notable female writers whose works have a decidedly feminist viewpoint. Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) Russian poet recognized both for her accomplished verse techniques and for her complex yet principled opposition to the injustices, repressions, and persecutions that took place in the early Soviet Union. She wrote her best-known work, the lyric poem Requiem, in secret over a five-year period between 1935 and 1940, describing the suffering of Russians under Stalinist rule. Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) Feminist and transcendentalist with strong family ties to Massachusetts, Louisa May Alcott is best known for her 1868 novel about four sisters, Little Women, based on an idealized version of her own family. Isabel Allende (born 1942) Chilean-American writer known for writing about female protagonists in a literary style known as magical realism. Shes best known for novels The House of the Spirits (1982) and Eva Luna (1987). Maya Angelou (1928-2014) African-American author, playwright, poet, dancer, actress, and singer, who wrote 36 books, and acted in plays and musicals. Angelous most famous work is the autobiographical I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969). In it, Angelou spares no detail of her chaotic childhood. Margaret Atwood (born 1939) Canadian writer whose early childhood was spent living in the wilderness of Ontario. Atwoods most well-known work is The Handmaids Tale (1985). It tells the story of a near-future dystopia in which the main character and narrator, a woman called Offred, is kept as a concubine (handmaid) for reproductive purposes. Jane Austen (1775-1817) Jane Austen was an English novelist whose name did not appear on her popular works until after her death. She led a relatively sheltered life, yet wrote some of the best-loved stories of relationships and marriage in Western literature. Her novels include Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1812), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma  (1815), Persuasion (1819) and Northanger Abbey (1819). Charlotte Brontà « (1816-1855) Charlotte Brontà «s 1847 novel Jane Eyre is one of the most-read and most-analyzed works of English literature. The sister of Anne and Emily Bronte, Charlotte was the last survivor of six siblings, the children of a parson and his wife, who died in childbirth. Its believed that Charlotte heavily edited Annes and Emilys work after their deaths. Emily Brontà « (1818-1848) Charlottes sister wrote arguably one of the most prominent and critically-acclaimed novels in Western literature, Wuthering Heights. Very little is known about when Emily Brontà « wrote this Gothic work, believed to be her only novel, or how long it took her to write. Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) First African American writer to win the Pulitzer Prize, she earned the award in 1950 for her book of poetry Annie Allen. Brooks earlier work, a collection of poems called, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), was praised as an unflinching portrait of life in Chicagos inner city. Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) One of the most popular British poets of the Victorian era, Browning is best known for her Sonnets from the Portuguese, a collection of love poems she wrote secretly during her courtship with fellow poet Robert Browning. Fanny Burney (1752-1840) English novelist, diarist, and playwright who wrote satirical novels about English aristocracy. Her novels include Evelina, published anonymously in 1778, and The Wanderer (1814). Willa Cather (1873-1947) Cather was an American writer known for her novels about life on the Great Plains. Her works include O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Antonia (1918). She won the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours (1922), a novel set in World War I. Kate Chopin (1850-1904) Author of short stories and novels, which included The Awakening and other short stories such as A Pair of Silk Stockings, and The Story of an Hour, Chopin explored feminist themes in most of her work. Christine de Pizan (c.1364-c.1429) Author of The Book of the City of Ladies, de Pizan was a medieval writer whose work shed light on the lives of medieval women. Sandra Cisneros (born 1954) Mexican-American writer is best known for her novel The House on Mango Street (1984) and her short story collection Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991). Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) Recognized among the most influential of American poets, Emily Dickinson lived most of her life as a recluse in Amherst, Massachusetts. Many of her poems, which had strange capitalization and dashes, can be interpreted to be about death. Among her most well-known poems are Because I Could Not Stop for Death, and A Narrow Fellow in the Grass. George Eliot (1819-1880) Born Mary Ann Evans, Eliot wrote about social outsiders within political systems in small towns. Her novels included The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), and Middlemarch (1872). Louise Erdrich (born 1954) A writer of Ojibwe heritage whose works focus on Native Americans. Her 2009 novel The Plague of Doves was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Marilyn French (1929-2009) American writer whose work highlighted gender inequalities. He best-known work was her 1977 novel The Womens Room. Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) Part of the New England Transcendentalist movement, Margaret Fuller was a confidant of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and a feminist when womens rights were not robust. Shes known for her work as a journalist at the New York Tribune, and her essay Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) A feminist scholar whose best-known work is her semi-autobiographical short story The Yellow Wallpaper, about a woman suffering from mental illness after being confined to a small room by her husband. Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965) Lorraine Hansberry  is an author and playwright whose best-known work is the 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun. It was the first Broadway play by an African-American woman to be produced on Broadway. Lillian Hellman (1905-1984) Playwright best known for the 1933 play The Childrens Hour, which was banned in several places for its depiction of a lesbian romance. Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) Writer whose best-known work is the controversial 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) New England novelist and poet, known for her style of writing, referred to as American literary regionalism, or local color. Her best-known work is the 1896 short story collection The Country of the Pointed Firs. Margery Kempe (c.1373-c.1440) A medieval writer known for dictating the first autobiography written in English (she could not write). She was said to have religious visions which informed her work. Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) Asian-American writer whose work focuses on Chinese immigrants in the U.S. Her best-known work is her 1976 memoir The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. Doris Lessing (1919-2013) Her 1962 novel The Golden Notebook is considered a leading feminist work. Lessing won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) Poet and feminist who received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923 for The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver. Millay made no attempts to hide her bisexuality, and themes exploring sexuality can be found throughout her writing. Toni Morrison (born 1931) The first African-American woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1993, Toni Morrisons best-known work is her 1987 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved, about a freed slave haunted by her daughters ghost. Joyce Carol Oates (born 1938) Prolific novelist and short-story writer whose work deals with themes of oppression, racism, sexism, and violence against women. Her works include Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? (1966), Because it is Bitter, and Because it is My Heart (1990) and We Were the Mulvaneys (1996). Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) Poet and novelist whose best-known work was her autobiography The Bell Jar (1963). Sylvia Plath, who suffered from depression, also is known for her 1963 suicide. In 1982, she became the first poet to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize posthumously, for her Collected Poems. Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) Adrienne Rich  was an award-winning poet, longtime American feminist, and prominent lesbian. She wrote more than a dozen volumes of poetry and several non-fiction books. Rich won the National Book Award in 1974 for Diving Into the Wreck, but refused to accept the award individually, instead sharing it with fellow nominees Audre Lorde and Alice Walker. Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) English poet known for her mystical religious poems, and the feminist allegory in her best-known narrative ballad, Goblin Market. George Sand (1804-1876) French novelist and memoirist whose real name was Armandine Aurore Lucille Dupin Dudevant. Her works include La Mare au Diable (1846), and La Petite Fadette (1849). Sappho (c.610 B.C.-c.570 B.C.) Most well-known of the ancient Greek women poets associated with the island of Lesbos. Sappho wrote odes to the goddesses and lyric poetry, whose style gave name to Sapphic meter. Mary Shelley (1797-1851) Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley  was a novelist best known for Frankenstein, (1818); married to the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley; daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) Suffragist who fought for womens voting rights, known for her 1892 speech Solitude of Self, her autobiography Eighty Years and More and  The Womans Bible. Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) Gertrude Steins Saturday salons in Paris drew artists such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Her best-known works are Three Lives (1909) and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). Toklas and Stein were longtime partners. Amy Tan (born 1952) Her best-known work is the 1989 novel The Joy Luck Club, about the lives of Chinese-American women and their families. Alice Walker (born 1944) Alice Walkers best-known work is the 1982 novel The Color Purple, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Shes also famous for her rehabilitation of the work of Zora Neale Hurston. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) One of the most prominent literary figures of the early 20th century, with novels like Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse (1927). Virginia Woolfs best-known work is her 1929 essay A Room of Ones Own.