Figure Enhancement Anyone?
A Few Techniques to Hone that Writing Scalpel!

By Terrie Leigh Relf

No matter how hard we work out at the computer, sometimes we realize that there’s a bit more padding than we want in one area and another area that needs a bit of enhancement.

Let’s get out our trusty do-it-yourself-home-prose-doctoring kits, hone those figurative writing scalpels, and create a new—or an improved—text! Isn’t it nice to know that there are still some forms of surgery that don’t require hefty insurance premiums and co-payments--and in most cases, with minimal intervention! 

Turn on that overhead lamp, focus the beam on the simile and the metaphor. Yes, there they are…Their relative proximity in the textual body makes for easier access, doesn’t it?  It’s also a plus that their functions are inter-related as well, in that they provide an intricate feedback system for meaning.

Let’s make the incision…

Similes and metaphors hail from the category of figurative language. Both make use of comparison, with the difference being that a simile usually uses the words, “like” or “as”, to denote this comparison, while a metaphor will equate one object with another—as if it IS that object, thus imbued with all, or some, of its qualities.

For example, to create a simile, you might write: “Tarn drinks like an ocelot.”  If Tarn were an ostrich, then this would be a simile.  However, if Tarn is an ocelot, then this would not be a simile because you’re comparing him to other ocelots that most likely have recognizable and species-specific drinking patterns. Unless, of course, you have a pet ocelot that you’ve trained to drink out of a champagne flute like a human.

If you wanted to create a metaphor from the above scenario, perhaps you’d write:  “My roommate, Brad, is an ocelot.”  Doesn’t that conjure up a need to put “Desperately Seeking New Roommate!” at your local café?  Now, if Brad is a member of this endangered cat family, then perhaps you should call The Humane Center or your local zoo.  However, if Brad is from the genus homo sapiens and embodies certain ocelot characteristics (e.g., is from Texas, has large spots, can run really fast, likes to climb trees, etc.), then that ad might not be such a bad idea.

How about another set of examples? A few years ago, I attended the Mars Panel at ComicCon, where one of the panelists said that Mars is the next frontier. This is a metaphor comparing the planet Mars with Earth’s Old West.  While we’ll need more efficient means of travel than horses, wagons, and feet, there are definitely more than a few acres of vast open space on Mars.  The question remains, however, as to whether or not it is habitable or already inhabited…

An extended metaphor would be one that was sustained throughout a poem.  This would be called the “conceit” of the poem.  For example:  The English teacher scavenged through desk drawers, clawed through old papers, then finding the one she was looking for, licked it clean of ink.”

An implied metaphor might resemble the following:  “The English teacher smiled, her feral teeth still dripping with fresh blood.  ‘O+ anyone’?”

Some people don’t like it when you mix your metaphors.  They like consistency.  They like coherence.  An example of a mixed metaphor would be something like the following (NOTE:  mixed metaphors want to be extended metaphors but they get all confused and tangled up in the process—unless they’re intentionally wrought this way…):  “Censorship is a bouncing ball on a stormy sea.”  Why is this a mixed metaphor?  For one, balls don’t bounce on seas, stormy or otherwise.  They usually bounce on floors or concrete. To “fix” this, I might say:  “Censorship is a deflated ball,” or “censorship is a ship sucked into the Bermuda Triangle.”

Many people really like clichés, which are often defined as worn-out, dried-up, oft heard phrases that used to be clever similes and metaphors.  You can make them work for you…well…sometimes. It’s great fun to take an old metaphor and give it a few jolts from the paddle…Check out the Cliched Muse section at http://www.sol-magazine.org.

I think it’s safe to say (another clichéd saying) that what may be a cliché to one person, or one genre of writer, may not be a cliché to another.  This leads to another point that needs to be made, which is that new experiences and new objects necessitate the need for new ways to identify them, hence, the imaginative, and some say, necessary, realm of neologisms.

What can you do to freshen up that language besides a new bag of O+? 

Conduct a cliché search in your work.  Is there another way to describe something?  If two people are kissing and one says, “the earth moved,” you could revise it to: “I just felt the universe shift,” or, “”was that a solar flare?”  Ok, I could do better, but you get the idea. 

Do you have any figurative language in your poem?  Would it add to or delete from your poem?  Sometimes, less is more.  Other times, more is more.  But there comes the time when any is too much.  If your poem is flat, dare I say, “boring” (I’ve had people tell me this before…), or someone else says, “nothing’s happening here for me,” then you may want to consider adding in a metaphor or a simile.

The first two lines of my poem, “the understudy,” are a simile: “you slay me/like some creature from a B horror flick…”  I’m planning to revise and expand this poem, and have been thinking about further Hitchcockian allusions.  What if the first line was redrafted as: “I am the shower where the blonde gets it.”

Here, I’m re-casting the narrator as a shower.  To say that a narrator is a shower, or that I have a poem narrated by an inanimate object, can make for an automatic catapult into metaphor land.  Imagine what that film set shower has seen.

I quite like the idea of a shower in confessional mode…

Do you have so many metaphors (i.e., mixed metaphors) in your poem that it becomes unclear what you’re talking about?  Not that poetry needs to have clarity.  Concrete images are good, though.  Are they symbolic?  Does something stand for something else?

Don’t forget that aliens love oranges…If someone is juggling oranges in a poem, that juggler is probably an alien, and those oranges are symbols for planets.

Terrie Leigh Relf is a writer, editor, poet, writing coach, and educator who lives in South Park, in San Diego, CA.  You may contact her at tlrelf@cox.net.