Similies/Metaphors that should be shot at dawn

I didn't see anything like this any where, and I always enjoy seeing what weird similies/metaphors people come up with. You know how it is. It's late and you're frantically trying to catch up/get ahead/met your goal and the next thing you know, you're comparing clouds to elephants in white taffeta tutus. (I just did this.) What similies/metaphors have you written that you want to take out into the woods and shoot at dawn?

I was trying to describe a scene in excessive detail a little while ago because I can't figure out what to have happen next. My first try:

It was a clear summer’s morning at precisely fifteen minutes before eleven in the morning and puffy white clouds danced in the sky like mildly intoxicated white elephants wearing taffeta tutus.

I actually kinda like this, though I doubt it's staying in in December.

I decided to try again and failed even more, though it *is* more words:


It was fifteen minutes to eleven in the morning. It was a perfect summer’s day with a sky like you’d find on a post card your Aunt Gertrude would send you from one of those perfect vacation destinations to write ‘Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here’, just to show off the fact she had the disposable income to take a vacation while you had to work four jobs just to afford to pay the rent of an apartment cock roaches would turn up their noses at, if cock roaches *had* noses that is.

*Do* roaches have noses? Not that that would save this similie, but now I'm wondering.

hahaha i love it! my metaphors are way lamer or probably dont make much sense!

Ugh yes. I usually come up with odd metaphors/similes when I'm non-NaNoing, but this one... this one beats them all with a wooden spoon. And it's the first sentence in my novel -headdesk-

"Shelly was in the process of leaning heavily in my arms to plant a couple of lovey dovey kisses to my blushing cheeks when the sound of static turns the entire school into one giant living ear."

Uggghhhhh. It's hideousssssss.

"I held a package out like a woman does her dead baby"
Just... no...
"She started stabbing the man like she was cutting up a melon for lunch, but frantically and without order"
So basically nothing like cutting up a melon at all. :/

My own late-night pathetic invention:

...flopping like a druken fish.

Yesterday I got so stuck looking for a simile that eventually I ended up with this just so I could get on with it.

"The sun had just risen above the eastern wall of the city, peeking between two of its grand towers like a fucking simile."

That probably won't make the cut when it comes time to edit.

"I fumble and crash around clumsily when it comes to stuff like that, like a drunk ballerina on crack."
Possibly my favourite line.

They can be lots of fun when you warp them and the characters are aware of the warping.

I was trying to explain my MC's face when she was explaining to her friend that her phone's battery had died, last week, and her friend knew that.

“The battery died. Like last week.” She stated, with a face like a cat when you wake them up by poking them for no reason.

^ As you can see. It did not go well. This is why I don't use similes that often. >_<

Not a simile/metaphor per se, but...

Quote:He seemed to be smiling, knowing well how both sides referred to the other as equally damned.

The tenement, with its crippling size, felt like it was a hippopotamus, standing tall and intimidating in the middle of its dreary swamp, the bird perched on top of its back was the building's large, red roof, and the muddy runs of water and decaying plant were the sad little Americans, living and walking among this great hippo constantly but never paying attention to it, as if it wasn't an amazing, extraordinary sight that deserves complete attention.


I... What?

The sky-bus station stands directly in the middle of the space station- gleaming silver and gold towers loom above, April feeling quite like an ant in a flight suit surrounded by enormous blades of metallic grass.

Whaaat.

This is not technically a simile or metaphor, but it makes me laugh. In describing an obscenely fancy, ornately carved/painted piano (in contrast to the simple piano that my FMC has) this came out:

"There were so many cherubs on this piano, I thought there must not be any left in heaven."

I don't know why, it just makes me laugh. Its cheesy, but I'm fond of it.

In my first nano, I described a character who was crying hard and trying not to, as 'sniffling like an anteater on crack'. Which somehow turned into five hundred words of backstory on the anteater. His name was Ant-ony. Right in the middle of an incredibly serious scene.

I ought to dig out my second 2007 novel. That one was one long nanoism (I finished the first one and it was quite serious and fried my brain), chock full of bad similies/metaphors. One of my favorites is, "Sally dropped into the chair the way a feather doesn't." I was trying to avoid the cliche of 'dropped like a rock'.

"Keena watched the body burning in the fire, like a war hero of an ant, burned under a magnifying glass by God, but more epic like if it was burned by Nelson Mandela, and definitely more epic than an ant under a magnifying glass. You know what, scratch that. The body burned like a dead person enveloped in caressing fabric that covered and consumed his body like the flaming tongues of a thousand rolls of tissue paper. Or maybe the body burned like the eternal torch that rests on the top of the tallest mountain, forever a beacon of hope to the world around it, which would work if there were mountains, or if the fire would burn that high up, or if the people in the world were actually thoughtful enough to know that it meant hope but they can't because they're on the pills! You know what? Just forget it."

I knew that was getting out of hand as I wrote it . . . but I couldn't stop. And it's in the middle of the saddest, most beautiful, most serious, most important scene of the whole novel. . . That's not going to make the cut in December. . .

Having a head-slapping moment with a hangover:

[Quote}If her head didn't feel like it was going to crumble to the ground like a dessicated taco shell, she would have smacked her forehead. [/Quote]

Okay... Um, yeah.

Jada groaned, sank deeper in her lonely corner booth, and watched the crowded dance floor. It looked like a breathing, writhing, living creature that Jada didn’t want to get too close to for fear it would swallow her up and she’d never see the light of day again.

Ouch. just.... ouch.

"She made a frustrated sound that was akin to jungle cat trying to claw it's way up a tree to eat an irritating baboon."

"The idea of something as squishy as her brother being hit with something as fast and blunt-force-trauma-causing as a car was not a very pleasant thought."

That's actually like, not a simile at all, is it...

For your entertainment:

Quote:I had dissolved from the contemplation of the mystery woman, one that possibly didn’t even exist except from in my brain, to a critical examination of my work in less time than it would take someone who could do something really fast to do that really fast thing, really fast.