The Trouble with Comparisons That Arrive Too Easily

Ask a room of writers to describe heartbreak and you will hear the same handful of images: a cracked vase, a storm at sea, a wound that will not close. None of them are wrong, exactly. They are simply worn smooth by other people's hands. A simile that arrives the moment you reach for it is usually a simile you have inherited rather than made.

The test is simple and slightly brutal. Could anyone else have written this line? If the answer is yes, the image is doing no work. Your reader has met it a hundred times before and will skim straight past it. Fresh comparison is not about being clever or decorative. It is about precision — finding the one object, texture or moment that pins an emotion down so exactly that the reader feels it rather than merely recognises it.

Start with the Body, Not the Dictionary

Emotions have no sensory texture of their own. Grief does not smell of anything; jealousy has no particular weight. But the moments in which we feel them are drenched in sensory detail, and that detail is where good similes live.

So instead of asking what is loneliness like?, ask: when did I last feel it sharply, and what was actually happening around me? Perhaps it was a Sunday evening in a supermarket car park, the trolley wheels rattling on wet tarmac, the smell of cold diesel. That is not a simile yet, but it is raw material. From there you might write: loneliness sat in her like the last twenty minutes of a supermarket car park on a wet Sunday. Strange, specific, and unmistakably yours.

Try this: choose an emotion and list three memories in which you felt it strongly. For each, note the temperature, one smell, one sound, and what was underfoot. You are not looking for poetry yet. You are looking for detail that only you can supply.

Let Real Places Do the Heavy Lifting

Generic landscapes — oceans, deserts, thunderstorms — are the most crowded similes in the language. Places you actually know are far richer because they come pre-loaded with mood, memory and odd, particular facts.

• A retail park at dusk, with its orange floodlights and half-empty units.
• The corridor outside a school office, smelling of floor polish and rain.
• A layby on an A-road, litter caught in the hawthorn.
• The back garden of a house you no longer live in.
• A launderette on a Tuesday afternoon, one machine still turning.

These carry emotional charge without you having to explain it. Compare her anger was like a storm with her anger was the moment before a kettle boils, when you can already hear the rumble starting under the noise. The second is domestic, familiar and quietly menacing. It works because it is observed rather than borrowed.

Build a Personal Image Bank

Writers who produce fresh similes consistently are rarely struck by lightning. They keep a store of material and return to it. Start a notebook — paper or digital, whichever you will actually use — and divide it by sense rather than by theme. Sections for textures, smells, sounds, overheard phrases, weather, small mechanical details.

Feed it deliberately:

• Write down one physical sensation a day in a single sentence.
• Note phrases people actually say, especially the odd ones.
• Record jobs you have done — the exact sound of a key in a stiff lock, the way emulsion dries.
• List places you pass weekly and describe each in three concrete nouns.

After a month you will have something no writing manual can give you: a private stock of images that belong to your life and therefore to your voice.

Three Questions to Test Any Simile

Once you have a candidate, interrogate it before it goes into the draft.

• Does it add something? If the plain statement is stronger, delete the comparison. Similes are not compulsory.
• Is it specific enough? Replace the general with the particular. Not like an old car but like a diesel that needs coaxing on a cold morning.
• Does it fit the voice? A simile must belong to the narrator's world. A character who has never left a city should not reach for a vineyard.

One strong image will do more than three decorative ones stacked together. If you find yourself writing two similes in a sentence, cut the weaker and let the better one breathe.

Keeping the Habit Honest

Every few weeks, read back through your work and highlight every comparison you have used. Patterns will emerge — you may find you reach for water, or weather, or machinery, over and over. That repetition is not always a fault; a recurring image can become a motif. But it should be a choice, not a tic.

When a simile feels tired, do not simply swap it for another from the same shelf. Go back to the memory, the street, the kitchen, the smell of rain on warm paving. The best comparisons do not feel invented. They feel remembered, and then shaped — and that is a craft you can practise every single day.