TTYU Retro: Similes, Cliché, and Added Information

Here's a hilarious post from Nicola Morgan about similes. If you aren't sure what a simile is, it's that thing you do where you say something is like something else. "He moved like a cat." "Her eyes were like sapphires." You've seen them before; they're everywhere, and a lot of them are clichéd.

So how do you avoid clichés and keep your similes under control? Nicola Morgan suggests that the simile must add meaning to the writing in order to be worthwhile, and points out that the entire content and connotation of the simile will be added (so be careful).

Question: what does that mean? What kind of meaning does a simile add?
My answer: two kinds.

First, a simile provides a comparison of a story event, character or object, with something else. As it does so, it lends all the qualities of that something else to the object (etc.) it describes. Here's an example, from my story "Smoke and Feathers":

...water reaches out over Ryuuji like a hand of glass.

What's happening here is that a boy, Ryuuji, is having water poured over him from a bucket. However, the effect of the water is far more than him getting wet. (I'll save that for those who read the story.) The simile compares the water to a hand reaching out, which gives the impression that the water could either grip Ryuuji, or maybe even cast a spell on him - things that hands, not water, can do. Thus when strange things start to happen afterward, we've already had a warning of it in the form of this simile.

Depending on the kind of word we choose to compare, the simile can bring along more connotations or evoke a more complete scene to go along with the thing that's being described. This is all included in the first kind of information that a simile imparts, through drawing a comparison.

The second kind of information that a simile can give us is character (and world) information. By this I mean, not comparing a character to something using a simile, but having the comparison itself reflect upon the person making it. If you are using point of view in your narrative, any simile you use will suggest things about the kind of person who would draw such a comparison. Here's an example that Nicola Morgan provided as being a bad example of a simile:

His words paralysed me. I was like a deer that's been transfixed by an arrow, right in its spine, so that it was alive but could not move. [The first sentence says it all. The simile simply adds some wholly unhelpful and, frankly, bizarre, extra images. We learn nothing extra and yet are bombarded with extraneous images of a dying Bambi.]

She says that the first sentence says all it needs to and we don't learn anything extra. I'm not sure about that, though - I personally think the simile suggests something unexpected and (perhaps) unwanted about the character making it. The original writer probably didn't have it in mind to suggest that this POV character was sadistic, or obsessed with death, or anything of that nature. Yet somehow they did. There's added information here, certainly, but information which can only confuse readers about the point of view character.

The information that similes (and metaphors) give us about the point of view character is in fact extremely valuable, and I highly recommend you take advantage in it as you write. Think about what kinds of comparisons your character would make, and why. The comparisons they make will show readers how they judge a situation, and will reflect on their sense of themselves and their own world. Similes give us an enormous opportunity to add dimension and life to our stories.

It's something to think about.

Tired of cliché? Want to be unique? Pursue the why.

They say it's details that make a setting unique. Some would say, "Don't just create a character who is the generic chosen one who grew up on a farm unaware of his destiny," and they'd be right, but it's been done successfully. I'm thinking a lot of this is about details.

If you're just starting out on something like this, though, hearing this advice can be maddening. Details? What details? The last thing you want to do is take the same old tired scenario and add on a few bells and whistles, a bunch of superficial stuff that you made up because somebody told you that you needed details. Then you're still sitting where you started, just with a lot of extra words.

Pursue the why.

It's not really the details that make the scenario unique. It's how the scenario grows out of your world organically. Does the city have dirty streets? Okay, then why are its streets dirty? Does the village have an idiot? Okay, then who is he, and what is his family like, and how did he come to be where he is? Does he have a real disability or is he simply disaffected?

There are all kinds of societal scenarios that we see constantly in stories. But the fact that we see them constantly may not be because people are unoriginal. It may simply be because these things are real features of our own world. If we're working in a different world, we can have these features appear, but it's important to dig down into the underpinnings of the world and ask, "Why would this common phenomenon happen in this world?" Because things don't happen for no reason.

To make this concrete, I'll tell you about an insight I had over the last two days about my Varin world. Funny enough, it's about a part of my Varin world that plays only a tiny part in my current novel in progress. I was inspired in part by last Wednesday's worldbuilding hangout, which I'll be reporting on this coming Wednesday. We were talking about how to make larger economic patterns in society concrete by thinking about their impact on individuals.

Here's the part that I had before. It's the part that isn't as original as it could be.

Varin has an undercaste. They take undesirable jobs, so they work with trash, or in cremation, or as prison janitors. They get abused in their jobs. They live in small apartments. They have hoodlum gangs. One of my characters, Meetis, works in a prison and has a "good job" and a "good apartment." The other character, Corbinan, is a trash collector who has an "okay job" but not a "good apartment." He is a fighter who used to live on the streets.

It's not that it's not detailed. I had put in a lot of setting and stuff. But look how it changes when I tell you what I figured out.

The undercaste members get different economic benefits from their different possible jobs. People who work in prisons get apartments near their work, clothing, and food paid for by their place of work, but they get paid virtually zero cash, so once they have the job, it's almost impossible for them to leave (because they would be homeless with no money), so they have no recourse and are pushed around by their superiors quite easily. People who work in crematories get housing near their work, and are required to maintain high standards of cleanliness, but they don't get fed at work; they are paid cash to buy their own food. They are also paid "by the body" as an incentive for them to do the hardest work. Thus they carry cash but this money is often seen as dirty. Trash collectors are paid by the hour, in cash, and receive no other benefits. Thus they have a hard time securing apartments, and often a group of several people will join together and pool funds to secure an apartment (even if the apartment isn't designed for so many people). People (especially teenagers) without jobs form gangs and steal to keep themselves alive, but it's far riskier for them to try to rob members of other castes, so they target the trash worker neighborhoods first, the crematory neighborhoods if they're desperate, and only then would they try to target a member of another caste. They don't bother with prison neighborhoods because there's no money in it. The trash workers create their own gangs so they can stand up to the penniless hoodlums. The only way to get cash outside of the system without stealing it is to be able to read. These people deal with government workers all the time and are handed papers they can't read, so they will pay anyone who can actually read what they're being given and help defend them against manipulation by the contract writers.

It sounds complicated, but what it does is establish the reasons why gangs exist, who has them and who doesn't, and where they operate. These are details, but they are not random. So once it's all set up in theory, then I operationalize it on my characters' lives.

Meetis is the daughter of prison workers. Her mother is a reader, which is the only honorable way she could get the money to buy a ticket for her daughter to take a prison job in the capital when jobs are scarce at home. Thus, Meetis has an apartment near her work that she shares with her cousin Flara. It isn't well-maintained, but it works. She wears company clothes and eats at work. She works hard and doesn't eat a lot, but she has a safe home and doesn't starve, and she isn't targeted by gangs unless she goes into someone else's neighborhood. She is also a reader, so she has the means to earn cash if she can find the time to fit in reading work.

Corbinan is the son of crematory workers. As a result he got a lot of hard teasing as a kid, had to learn to fight early and ended up running away from home, and running with the hoodlum gangs. When he realized he was starving, but was too young to get a job, he decided to learn to read, so he cornered a reader and threatened him with a beating if he didn't teach him the skill. Once he could read he was able to separate from the hoodlum gangs and save some money, and when he was old enough he got a job as a trash worker. He lives in an apartment with six other people who work out of the same trash center, and though he's tired of gangs generally, he's now a target of the hoodlum groups, so he and the other six form a gang for their own protection. Now he uses his fighting skills to run off the hoodlums, and also to help the gang leader make sure everyone pays a fair share of rent. He's far too smart ever to pick a fight with a member of another caste, but if he and his gang become targets, he can hold his own long enough to help the others get away.

Suddenly he's not just some guy who knows how to fight for who knows what reason. He's simultaneously jealous of Meetis' easy life and a bit contemptuous of her for her lack of "freedom," and her lack of toughness. We can also see why Meetis' life is easy compared to his, but why it is hard on her anyway.

The phenomena are still there, but the whole thing feels different.

The Experience of Pregnancy

How many of you out there have ever been pregnant? The number of you answering "yes" is going to be limited by certain factors, such as being female, being of a certain age, etc.

Okay, then, how many of you have ever considered writing about a pregnant person in a story? Probably far more - the limiting factors aren't so limiting in fiction!

So many times when I see pregnancy in a fictional context, it tends to fall into the tired old throwing up - food cravings - fat tummy combination. But there's so much more to pregnancy than that! So for those who might want to know for their research, I thought I'd start this entry. I encourage any of you who have experienced pregnancy and would like to contribute any of your own experiences to comment at the end of this post. I'm trying not to be gross here, so please keep the comments informative and not too detailed.

Let me start with some refuting/refinement of the traditional basics, and then I'll add some different kinds of pregnancy stuff.

1. Throwing up.
Not everyone does this - I felt nauseated at times, but never actually threw up in either of my pregnancies. Morning sickness can hit people in the morning, but sometimes people feel it more strongly in the afternoon (I did). For some, it can last all day. My own experience was that I would feel nausea if my stomach was ever totally empty. Therefore, I had to make sure not ever to let my stomach be empty. I took food with me everywhere (more on this below). Morning sickness for most people lasts through the first trimester (12 weeks); for me it lasted 15 weeks. I have known people for whom it lasted through the entire pregnancy, but this is more rare. So if you have a character experiencing morning sickness in their 8th month of pregnancy, this is a really unusual thing (and in addition, they've probably had it all along until then).

2. Food cravings.
Yes, these happen. But pickles and ice cream would be something I'd expect to hear about from one woman in a hundred (or maybe more). My experience was more that I wanted to eat in a particular pattern. This pattern was different for different pregnancies. With my son, I wanted to eat meat. Lots of meat, in lots of forms (though I remember feeling revulsion for tangerine beef; go figure). With my daughter, it was vegetables and fruit. Meat didn't gross me out, but neither was I excited about it. I definitely did want to keep supplies of my favorite foods available. Note for the curious: this is not a boy/girl thing. It's all about the individual pregnancy and the individual child. I have heard lots of stories about indicators that you're carrying a boy or a girl, but none that actually have consistent patterns across groups of people. The thing I experienced the most was hunger, and hunger like I'd never known it. A moment would come, and I would need to eat. NOW. Even once the nausea effect was gone, the hunger effect would remain, and I'd get so ravenous that I'd feel dizzy and angry. This again was why I carried food with me all the time. I wasn't able to wait five minutes for a table.

3. Fat tummy.
The weight that a woman gains in pregnancy is significantly more than the weight of the baby, but she may or may not put on fat. This weight comes from amniotic fluid, placenta, and other things - not the least of which would be the extra blood the woman needs during a pregnancy (up to 50% more than usual). Early in the pregnancy you'll see the tummy bulge but it will feel soft because the uterus will still be too small and too far down in the pelvis to feel. The hard round tummy of later pregnancy is the feel of the uterus which has pushed other things (intestines, etc.) out of the way. In a second or subsequent pregnancy, the abdomen will expand more quickly than in the first pregnancy, because the body has already "learned" how to stretch out to accommodate a growing baby. In addition, the tummy does not expand gradually and consistently, but will remain at one size for a period of time, and then expand rapidly over a day or two before staying at that size for another longer period.

Some other elements of pregnancy that aren't usually accurate in fiction include:

• a pregnant woman may experience slower digestion (even constipation), but she'll have to go to the bathroom more often because she'll be eliminating the baby's wastes as well as her own, and the uterus often presses down on the bladder.
• a pregnant woman will have changes in balance, and may stumble or fall, or have difficulty navigating stairs or narrow aisleways (such as passing people in a theater or stadium). The irregular expansions of the belly have a lot to do with this, as they change your center of gravity constantly.
  
• a pregnant woman will very often experience an increase in the sense of smell. I could smell cigarette smoke practically half a mile away; a friend of mine was able to smell pizza before it even came out of the kitchen. My brother referred to this as "Spidey-senses." Perhaps included in this is an increased awareness of surroundings, and increased anxiety about dangers.
  
• starting around the third trimester the woman will probably start to feel Braxton-Hicks contractions, which are uterine contractions not associated with actual labor. (It feels for a few moments like you're holding a basketball inside your stomach!) For most women I know, it has been difficult to distinguish between strong Braxton-Hicks contractions and the early onset of actual labor. Cries of "The baby's coming!" and "It's time!" occur often in fiction, but seldom in real life.
• one very common symptom of pregnancy is extreme fatigue. My own experience with this was having sudden waves of fatigue hit and knowing I had about ten seconds to lie down (bed, couch, wherever) before I'd fall asleep, whether I wanted to or not. During my first pregnancy, I'd sleep for two hours each time. During my second, the baby would wake me up after a much shorter time. On one of those occasions, I discovered he had learned to use the CD player while I was sleeping! I'm very lucky he wasn't a destructive baby.
• the "water" doesn't always break. Some women experience their water breaking at home, and some in public places. It's not always dramatic, though our pregnancy counselor joked that if it happened at the grocery store you should just break a pickle jar on the floor and shout "clean-up on aisle 3!" However, once the water breaks the baby needs to come out within 48 hours or be at risk of infection.

A few last thoughts - I include these because they stand out to me, though childbirth and its aftermath aren't really official topics of this post:

• women don't always scream in childbirth.
  
• women experience continued contractions after the birth (even when everything is out), because these serve to bring the uterus back down to its normal size and to stop the bleeding.
• breastfeeding is both instinctive and learned, and it isn't easy at first; it's also very individual. There's no one way to do it.
  

I hope this post expands your thinking about pregnancy if you haven't experienced it. It's worth doing research about it if you want to include it in a story. The web has lots of sites where you can find medical information about pregnancy and its physiological changes, including this one. You can also interview friends or try to find personal accounts of pregnancy experiences. It's worth doing, so that your story doesn't fall into a pregnancy cliché by accident.

Body language: are there clichés?

Recently on the Absolute Write forum I encountered a really good question about body language. In the midst of discussion on another topic entirely one writer asked whether there were any "good gestures" or whether all gestures were "clichéd, like smiling and shrugging".

I'd never thought about it this way, even though I've discussed body language before (here and on other forums). Would a gesture be cliché? Or would it only be the way the gesture was handled in written form?

I'll start with the second question, and then go back to the first. Anything we write can turn out badly if we handle it wrong, and if an author chose to use the same gesture too many times in close succession, that could definitely look repetitive. It would be a problem, but a problem of the writing. There are possible "show don't tell" issues surrounding gestures as well. There might be times when a more detailed description of a character's body movements is more appropriate than simple use of the word "shrugged." If you're writing along and you come to a point where a person has to show discomfort in their body language, there are many ways you can choose to have them do it - scratching an ear, shuffling feet, looking away, etc. - so you can make a conscious choice to have that behavior fit the character's personality or the formality of the context. For example, at a formal dinner party, a person might simply look away from the person he/she is talking to without showing any other physical signs of discomfort. Making good choices in such contexts is part of creating a successful story. By all means, don't say "he furrowed his brow" every single time someone has to express disapproval.

What about the question of whether gestures themselves can be cliché? My immediate instinct is to say no, they can't. Mind you, they can be repetitive. Body language isn't verbal or grammatical, but it does have a "code." Some gestures are "fixed expressions," such as the shrug or the handshake. Other gestures have different interpretations depending on the context in which they appear - eye-widening can mean surprise, fear, amazement, or exasperation, and we have to look at how it is described and what is happening or being said around it in order to understand its meaning. It's interesting to consider that sometimes we have different words to differentiate between these contexts - for example, "glaring" for the exasperated eye-widening, and "staring" for at least two of the other contexts. Smiling is another physical cue that can mean joy, evil pleasure, or nervousness depending on where it appears.

Many gestural cues vary across cultures - something to keep an eye out for. In Japan people point to their own noses while saying "Me?" rather than their chests; they point with the whole hand and not with just one finger; they beckon with the palm facing down, not up. These are the kinds of things one can vary when dealing with fantasy societies or aliens, and one can even exploit misunderstandings in gesture for critical plot moments.

Body language is extremely useful to a writer. It can and should be used. Because I usually write in very tight points of view (first person or tight third person), I find body language very useful. I use emotional description or internalization for the point of view character, and descriptions of body language and facial expressions for other characters in the scene (along with the pov character's judgment of their meaning). Here's an example:

[Tagret] risked a glance and caught Fernar gaping in horror, Della's Yoral in what could only be called a valiant effort not to look - something. Amused, hopefully, rather than insulted.

This allows you to create a solid sensation of point of view and keep your characters differentiated (even when they aren't speaking!).

So if you feel at this point that you may have a shorter list of body language tools than you would like to have, I'll give you a short list of possible body language cue types and what they may be useful for. Of course, there's no way to cover everything!

• The direction someone is facing - good for first impressions of a person's mood, where their attention is focused, and how safe they feel
• Where a person is looking (making eye contact or looking at a particular object) - good for showing what a character is paying attention to, and how ready they are for conversation or confrontation.
• Open or closed body posture - this shows mood and receptiveness. The more bunched up a person is, the more uncomfortable they appear (like my poor daughter at the dentist's yesterday!). A person can also close body to one side and open to another by crossing the legs and turning the shoulders, perhaps to show preference to one love interest over another.
• Placement of the hands - this shows mood, anxiety level, and can also give information about character and personality depending on what the person is holding or what they are doing with their hands.
• Height of the shoulders - another mood indicator
• Ease of breathing - great to show fear, relief, relaxation, excitement, etc.

This is just a short list, as I said, to get you started. One great thing to do is go out with your anthropologist's glasses on, set yourself in a public place and watch how people move. Figure out what your instincts tell you about certain body postures. Then you can enrich your own list of body language cues and work on incorporating these into your writing. It's the best way I can think of to avoid the problem of a body language cliché.