How to Write a Simile That Draws Blood

I allow myself one ornament. The simile. And I allow maybe five of them a chapter, and every single one has to earn the rent or it's out on the sidewalk with its bags.

That sounds stingy. It's the opposite. It's how you keep the few you use loaded.

Here's the thing nobody tells you about crime writing: it's where similes go to die. The genre runs on them, so the genre drowns in them, and most of what drowns is decoration — the writer stepping in front of the scene to show you a card trick. He was angry, like a man who was very angry. That's not a simile. That's a guy clearing his throat. It tells you nothing the sentence didn't already have, and it costs you the one thing a reader gives you that you can't get back, which is momentum.

So I run every one through a single gate. Does it do a job? There are only three jobs on offer. Sharpen an image so it cuts. Reveal the character. Build the world. If the simile isn't doing one of those three, it's a tourist, and tourists get cut.

Watch what a working one does.

He held the phone the way a priest holds a snake.

Count what that buys. It's an image — you see the grip, the distance, the thumb and finger doing the minimum. But it's also character: this is a man who fears the thing in his hand, who has to touch it anyway, who does it with something between duty and disgust. Fear, obligation, revulsion, all in eight words, and I never named one of them. That's the whole trick. The good simile does the describe-don't-explain work at the level of the sentence. It shows you the emotion by comparing it to a thing, and you feel the thing, so you feel the emotion.

Now the deep move, the one that separates a simile that decorates from a simile that draws blood.

The comparison should come out of the character's world, not the writer's.

A man who spent twenty years in a mill reaches for mill images — heat, weight, the shriek of metal that means something's about to go wrong. A woman who's buried three husbands out of the same parish reaches for church. When you write the room had the quiet of a confessional after the priest leaves, you're not just describing a room. You're telling the reader who's standing in it — somebody who knows exactly what that particular quiet feels like, which means somebody who's spent time on the wrong side of that little screen. The simile characterizes the person doing the comparing. That's the version that earns its place twice.

Get that reflex and you stop reaching for the pretty comparison and start reaching for the true one — true to the person whose head you're in. A collections guy doesn't think a silence is like the calm before a storm. He's never watched a storm; he's watched a man decide whether to pay. He thinks the silence is like the second before a door opens or doesn't. That's his, not yours.

Try building one. Start flat.

She poured the coffee. She was tense.

Dead. Now give it a job, and pull the image from her world — say she runs a diner she inherited and hates.

She poured the coffee like she was doing it at gunpoint.

Better — image plus a whole biography of resentment, and I still haven't used the word tense. The reader supplies it. The reader always supplies it, if you build the machine right and then get out of the way.

One warning, because this is where it goes wrong. The gift is also the trap. A writer who nails one good simile wants to nail six in a paragraph, and now the page is all fireworks and no sky. Restraint is the whole discipline. The reason mine land — when they land — is that the reader's gone three pages on plain, hard sentences and isn't braced for one. You don't get the sucker punch if you're throwing them the whole round.

So here's the test, and it's the only one I use. Cut the simile. Read the sentence without it. If nothing's lost but something pretty, leave it cut. If the sentence went dull, went flat, lost a thing the reader needed to see or to know about the person seeing it — put it back. That one earned it.

The rest are just you, in a nice coat, doing card tricks while the body cools.