Metaphor And Simile

I was trying to finish the editing on a long story the other day when I got to thinking about metaphors and similes. They are easy to do wrong, as I've learned from experience, most recently on that story, but done right they can carry the reader like a good Morgan horse.

Here are a few I found on my bedside shelf tonight:

The fog tore apart, light charged the sea like blue neon.

--E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News.

If heartaches were matches, her little house would have burned down a long time ago.

--Rick Bragg, The Valley of Broken Hearts, St. Petersburg Times, August 1, 1993.

In the darkness of his face his eyes set yellow, and they were prone to glow like wished coins in a silt creek.

--J. Wes Yoder, Carry My Bones.

The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning.

--Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting.

She called the white men by made-up names and gave them the day and time God would take them to heaven, would drag each and every member of their families across the sky and toss them into hell with no more thought than a woman dropping strawberries into a cup of cream.

--Edward P. Jones, The Known World.

Lodged in faults and crevices a hundred feet above them were nests of straw and jetsam from old high waters and the riders could hear the mutter of thunder in some nameless distance and they kept watch on the narrow shape of sky overhead for any darkness of impending rain, threading the canyon's close pressed flanks, the dry white rocks of the dead river floor round and smooth as arcane eggs.

--Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian.

He began a sentence: "I am -- " but when he was taken by surprise, every sentence became an adventure in the woods; as soon as he could no longer see the light of the clearing from which he'd entered, he would realize that the crumbs he'd dropped for bearings had been eaten by birds, silent deft darting things which he couldn't quite see in the darkness but which were so numerous and swarming in their hunger that it seemed as if they were the darkness, as if the darkness weren't uniform, weren't an absence of light but a teeming and corpuscular thing, and indeed when as a studious teenager he'd encountered the word "crepuscular" in McKay's Treasury of English Verse, the corpuscles of biology had bled into his understanding of the word, so that for his entire adult life he'd seen in twilight a corpuscularity, as of the graininess of the high-speed film necessary for photography under conditions of low ambient light, as of a kind of sinister decay; and hence the panic of a man betrayed deep in the woods whose darkness was the darkness of starlings blotting out the sunset or black ants storming a dead opossum, a darkness that didn't just exist but actively consumed the bearings that he'd sensibly established for himself, lest he be lost; but in the instant of realizing he was lost, time became marvelously slow and he discovered hitherto unguessed eternities in the space between one word and the next, or rather he became trapped in that space between words and could only stand and watch as time sped on without him, the thoughtless boyish part of him crashing on out of sight blindly through the woods while he, trapped, the grownup Al, watched in oddly impersonal suspense to see if the panic-stricken little boy might, despite no longer knowing where he was or at what point he'd entered the woods of this sentence, still manage to blunder into the clearing where Enid was waiting for him, unaware of any woods -- "packing my suitcase," he heard himself say.

--Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections.

That Franzen sentence stretches to 348 words, or the equivalent of an unbroken 10-inch story.

Anyway. Would you share some of your favorite similes and metaphors here?

And let's talk about how they relate to newspapers. What are the rules for incorporating them into news? Do we see too many or too few in our pages? How can we learn to do them better?