It Was How Big?

David Long

Apr 11, 2025

Mes amis: As always, thanks to you new subscribers/followers. I promise to not waste your time (he said, splitting the infinitive).

This week’s the TWO-YEAR ANNIVERSARY of David’s Lists 2.0 (103 posts in all)!

Thanks for making it possible! To quote Moby Dick’s narrator: This is my substitute for pistol and ball.1

Finally, two asks:

a) It’s tempting to read everything on your phone, but a tablet or laptop lets you see the posts the way I make them—layout, font, etc.

b) Thirty more subscribers gets us to 500. Wanna help? [And of course all subscriptions are free here @ David’s Lists 2.0.]

Today’s Post

I’m telling a friend about my ill-considered attempt to brace a sagging tree branch with a wooden pole, how I gave it one more lusty upthrust, which cracked a vertebra (T12). “It was like being hit by a sniper’s bullet,” I say.2

We do this constantly—it’s a fundamental instinct: the desire to make an experience real for someone who wasn’t there by comparing the unknown thing to a known thing. As we’ll see, this motive often gets entangled with others, but I think bearing witness is at the core—and, really, at the core of all storytelling.

TWELVE ASPECTS OF LIKENESS

1. Bearing witness:

We’ve already touched on this one. Re-planting your experience (real or imagined) in another mind—for the sake of truth (“the record”), persuasion, art, etc.

2. Voice:

You start reading, ignorant at first. You listen, you ask yourself: Who is this? Who’s talking? What do they want? Do I take the words literally, or are they coming slantwise?

You can’t absorb the story correctly without knowing what’s sarcasm and what’s not, or that the character isn’t a direct, unskewed avatar of the writer, or that the character can’t be trusted . . . and so on. Consider the source. That simile you just read—is it understatement/deadpan? Is it a sly joke, shameless hyperbole, wishful thinking? Does it mimic someone else’s voice? What’s its mood/psychological temperature? And so on. You cannot be tone-deaf and be a good reader. Period.

Voice is . . . 3

3. Breaking the status quo:

Some good writing is all Cirque de Soleil, some is like your no-nonsense Aunt Claire explaining what to do if the pilot light goes out. Whatever its degree of flamboyance, all good writing has rhythm, dynamics, shifts in tone, etc.

Ramping up the energy level of prose with quick injections of figurative language is a nearly universal strategy among writers. Some do it constantly, some much less often, but it remains a basic tool in the art of making the story clear, immediate, hard to ignore, resonant. Figurative language sparks different circuits in the brain.

4. Rubber Band:

In my late 20s, I circumnavigated Montana, teaching writing to kids in all kinds of venues—big city high schools, reservation schools, alt-schools, one-room school houses in the outback. Gradually, I collected a bagful of explanations/analogies/etc. that helped me demystify the writing process. One I used over and over was the rubber band.

I’ll use it again here to make two related points:

Picture me in front of the desks, my hands spread apart, connected by an imaginary rubber band. I say: In each hand I have something that’s pretty different from what’s in the other. As you can see, the rubber band is so taut that if you pluck it, it makes a note. The two things are trying not to have anything to do with each other, but my muscles are strong enough to get them this close to each other. And so on. Muscles = imagination. Saying that two things you wouldn’t think are related actually have a property in common is higher-energy/outside-the-box thinking.

You’ll have noticed that, so far, I’ve made no distinction between simile and metaphor. This is how I tried to explain the difference to schoolkids: Sometimes you stretch the rubber band until it won’t stretch another millimeter (picture my hands trembling with exertion) . . . suddenly your imagination overpowers the two things trying to be unalike and they slam together so powerfully they make a third thing.

A vs. B = C

That’s metaphor.

I might then describe how a toxic yellowish-green gas and a soft metal that burns at room temperature make table salt.

5. The Two Modes:

Good comparisons surprise us, yet need to make immediate sense, too. If you baffle the reader, the reader stops reading and starts problem-solving. Here’s Polish writer, Bruno Schulz, showing us a churchyard at dawn, crows bursting from the trees “in large flocks, like gusts of soot.”

Or this brief description in The Book of Blam (1972) by Serbian novelist, Aleksandar Tišma:

. . . the wind blows, biting and dry . . . from cracked earth and faded asphalt into windows, under doormats and doors, down noses and throats, making people cough and choke, tearing posters from poles, bending trees in parks and rattling the craftsmen’s tin signs till they squawk like frightened poultry.

Two objects—in this case, sounds—resemble each other physically, the first, perceived now, calls to mind the second, which amplifies it, giving the moment an emotional resonance. The formula here is A = B.

The other mode uses a different formula: A = C, B = C. It’s not the things that resemble each other, but the emotional state they arouse in a character or the reader—a shot of joy or sadness or fear or wonderment. The A and B things, themselves, are unalike. This kind of simile is a dive with a higher degree of difficulty; they sometimes flop—they can be too oblique or feel contrived or need explanation. But good ones can seem feel stunningly correct

After his death, the narrator of Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel, Kairos (2021) addresses her older, gifted but abusive lover :

The word “love” was always as hollow for you as a chocolate Santa.

One of the women populating Sarah Waters’s, The Night Watch (2006), set amid the London Blitz, becomes panic-stricken as she searches the flat for a note from her lover:

Again that grubby voice rose inside her, just pointed out to her that here she was picking her way through bits of dust like an imbecile, when all the time Julia was out with Ursula Waring or some other woman, laughing at the very thought of her— She had to thrust this voice back down. It was like pressing down the spring in a grinning jack-in-the-box.

6. Avoid Clichés Like the Plague:

I know I’m preaching to the choir, but isn’t it a drag when a writer seems to be calling it in? Being lazy, settling for trite/canned/low-energy language? Isn’t this a major reason we toss books aside, the writing?

Most clichés start out true—the fleece on Mary’s lamb was, in fact, the color of snow, the tack I pulled from my heel was indeed sharp. Untruth isn’t the problem, it’s our numbness from hearing them all our lives. A few minutes ago I downloaded “681 Cliches to Avoid in Your Creative Writing”4 What a treasury! It reminded me how often words/phrases move from literal to figurative, sometimes losing the original sense—who remembers that a tinker was once an itinerant cookware repairer? Anyway, as I scanned this pile I found a few I still kind of admire—old as dirt, dumb as box of rocks (especially when infused with a touch of irony), and had to tip my hat to the wit behind . . . not over until the fat lady sings. I’m digressing, sorry.5

So, my point: Comparison-making should seem fresh, not shopworn (unless put in the mouth of an unfresh character). You knew that already, but I had to say it so I could say the next thing.

7. Workhorses:

In any piece of good writing you find lines that just keep their heads down and pull the wagon without complaint:

He strolled out of the postoffice and turned to the right. [James Joyce, Ulysses]
The large room was full of people. [F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby]
Charles came into the parlor. [Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary]

The same is true in the realm of comparison—some are neither zingers nor duds. Sometimes all you want is clarity. The prosecutor asks the witness, That sound you heard, was it more like a bag of flour hitting the floor or like the cat knocking over a flower pot? She answers, No, the first one, like a heavy thud, you know?

In Hemingway’s, A Farewell to Arms (1929), Lt. Frederic Henry checks on the line of vehicles in the long shed:

They were top-heavy, blunt-nosed ambulances, painted gray and built like moving-vans.

In All the Light We Cannot See (2014), Anthony Doerr writes:

We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust.

Even this not-all-that-fresh line from Rita Bullwinkel’s, Headshot (2024) a bout-by-bout account of the Daughters of America Cup boxing tourney for girls in their mid-teens:

The sweat droplets sparkle like a shower of diamonds.

Because it’s true to the moment, the sheen on the boxer’s skin under the overhead lights, the jerking, glinting limbs . . . but also because it’s given to the one lowly journalist in attendance, trying to find grace or significance in this shabby gym, this barely attended event. And because, throughout, the writing is lean, generally free of B.S., and the depiction of the fighter’s moment-to-moment reality is consistently surprising. And, finally, because she occasionally pops out wackily accurate observations such as this one about the scarcely engaged coaches ringside:

[They] really are useless, like stoned older brothers getting paid by their parents to chaperone a middle school dance.

8. Turbo:

A moment ago, I said figurative language breaks up the status quo. Let’s hit that idea again, from a different angle:

Sometimes a writer senses that the regular way of putting things isn’t up to the task. The thing or state of being they need to portray is so unique or ineffable or infused with significance that it can be rendered only through imagery.

This dynamic is at work in the opening of Andrea Lee’s short story “Winter Barley.” She describes the place in plain language first, then, zeroing in on its emotional core, turns to the figurative:

Night; a house in northern Scotland. When October gales blow off the Atlantic, one thinks of sodden sheep huddled downwind and of oil cowboys on bucking North Sea rigs. Even a large, solid house like this one feels temporary tonight, like a hand cupped around a match.

In The First Man, Albert Camus tries to depict the abject futility he feels when trying to find a trace of his father, killed young in the First World War. It’s one of the most devastating images I’ve ever read:

What remains of that obscure life? Nothing, an impalpable memory—the light ash of a butterfly wing incinerated in a forest fire.6

Or Michael Ondaatje, in The English Patient (1992), telling us what the young nurse, Hana, experiences:

She herself had been trained at Women’s College Hospital and then sent overseas during the Sicilian invasion. That was in 1943. The First Canadian Infantry Division worked its way up Italy, and the destroyed bodies were fed back to the field hospitals like mud passed back by tunnellers in the dark.

Or the orphaned narrator of Jerzy Kosińksi’s, The Painted Bird (1965), wandering through Eastern Europe in the aftermath of WWII—a medieval-seeming landscape, drenched with ignorance and cruelty. He’s taken in by an old woman, but even this charity fails to warm his spirit, to shield him from her physical presence:

She looked like an old green-gray puffball, rotten through and waiting for a last gust of wind to blow out the black dry dust from inside.7

9. Visualizing the Invisible:

Every writer eventually runs into the problem of how to talk about things that lack a physical reality. Ideas, mental states, principles, and so on. We have abstract words for them—mercy, stinginess, inevitability, sin, gratitude, ambivalence, grief, sagacity, loneliness, eternity. This language is sometimes enough. But when it isn’t, when it seems too general, too bloodless, too non-specific, writers often try to physicalize the abstractions.

Stefan Zweig does this in Beware of Pity (1938). He might’ve written, Illusions are not easily dispelled, and let it go at that. But I picture him, instead, lingering over the statement a few beats longer, feeling the act of dispelling in his body, maybe as a brisk, downward, getting-rid-of motion, and somehow linking illusions to the strange brilliance of mercury. And so, the actual line:

You can’t dispel illusions as easily as you shake down the quicksilver in a thermometer.

Christa Wolf uses the same tactic:

. . . as a child she had imagined that her soul was like an appendix, a pale, crooked little tube of skin, that, in fact, resided in her chest cavity, near her stomach, where fear was located as well. It had probably never occurred to her that her appendix, which looked just like her soul, could be removed by operation.8

And, in The Heart of the Matter (1948), Graham Greene:

Hysteria and honesty receded: cunning came back across the threshold like a mongrel dog.

And Toni Morrison, in Sula (1973):

But it was a love that, like a pan of syrup kept too long on the stove, had cooked out, leaving only its odor and a hard, sweet sludge, impossible to scrape off.9

10. When More Is Too Much:

Another memory from Montana’s Poets in the Schools: Reading Pablo Neruda’s, “Ode To My Socks” to classrooms. It’s too long to quote (you can read it here). What a radical idea, though, wildly praising something so commonplace, so easily overlooked. And what a good model, a long skinny poem full of wild imagining—the socks are like this and this and this— It’s playful, high-spirited, a cornucopia of imagery. The over-the-top-ness comes straight from the poem’s exuberantly thankful mood.10

Yet, other times, piling on can seem like what my father called gilding the lily. So what’s wrong with gilding the lily? For one thing, it can feel like trying too hard, not trusting the authority of what you’ve already said, nervously adding to it like a shill for kitchen gadgets—Wait, there’s more!!! If it’s a good lily it doesn’t need gilding. My advice to students: Say it once, confidently, and move on.

[A little more on trying too hard.11]

Another reason for not piling on: If you’re given a strew of things, you tend to read too fast, not devoting enough attention to each image. I remember writing in the margins of student stories: Wait, you just said it was X, now you’re saying it’s Y? You didn’t mean the first thing? Sometimes it feels like a writer’s just throwing words down without letting their meaning or resonance take hold.

Finally, there are writers who compare things so incessantly that it seems like a tic, a nervous habit, rather than the response to an actual writerly need. Sometimes I think, Where’s the editor? Why didn’t someone X-out the weaker ones?

[Or are we living in a post-editorial world?]

11. Comedy:

Punch lines come at the end. The lit fuse sparks its way toward the TNT, but it takes a while. We have to be set up, made to wait, our curiosity building. Writers need comic timing, too—holding back, holding back, then the reveal. A few examples from literary novels:

In Dale Peck’s The Law of Enclosures, Orchard, fifty-two and five times married, opines: “Honey . . . men are like dogs. They only do tricks when they’re hungry.”
Throughout The Horse's Mouth, Joyce Cary’s rapscallion artist, Gulley Jimson mutters lines like: It was as dark as the inside of a cabinet minister.
In William Gass’s first novel, Omensetter’s Luck (1966), a character describes Jethro Furber, the town’s evangelical preacher, trying to fish your soul out like the last pickle.

Sometimes a simile will seem both desperately funny and horrific—the tension between the two values can shiver our timbers. A couple from my personal Hall of Fame:

. . . the smell from the decaying offal and from the corpses of men and animals became intolerable and hung constantly, undisturbed by wind, as a foul miasma over the fortifications. While the lull in the firing persisted, the Magistrate ordered earth to be thrown over the rotting mountain of offal in order to cover it like the crust of a pie.

—J. G. Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur (1973)12

On sunny days [the executioner] would sit or lie all day long on the bridge in the shade under the wooden blockhouse. From time to time he would rise to inspect the heads on the stakes, like a market-gardener his melons.

—Ivo Andrić, The Bridge on the Drina13

12. And Finally:

When I got to Missoula, late summer of 1972, James Welsh had published one book of poems, Riding the Earthboy 40 (1971). Over the next years, I would get to know him a bit—I came to admire his work and his kind demeanor. A couple of years later, his first novel appeared, Winter in the Blood (1974). I absorbed the story and the spare writing—it seems permanently enmeshed in my first understandings of Montana and my place in it.

On its opening page, the young Blackfeet/Gros Ventre narrator tries to explain how lost/disconnected he feels. He says:

I was as distant from myself as a hawk from the moon.

I’ve had this line in my head for fifty years. No razzle-dazzle, just pure, essential image. In twelve words it says what the novel’s about.