I’m not great at coming up with creative similes and analogies, though I understand that writers generally should be. I’m also kind of lazy, and since thinking is hard, I found myself the other day underwhelmingly describing (via a text thread to some friends) a beautiful woman I had seen. Trying to capture her essence, I texted that “Her skin was the color of peanut butter. Skippy, not Jif.” (Creamy Skippy is my favorite kind of peanut butter and there is no contest—and, for the record, the NY Times agrees with me).
I went on, “Her hair is like a beautiful brown thing of some kind resting on her head. Like maybe a beaver, but a beaver with long hair and without that big tail.”
Soon I had refined my initial observations of her beauty: “Her skin is like butter … butter dipped in something tan, like maybe shoe polish. Tan shoe polish.”
“She is really something to look at,” I concluded.
I could have gone on—she really was that beautiful. Her smile was like two separate things that come together sometimes, but at other times part, kind of like a zipper, but instead, all at once. And her legs… Her legs were like long things, like logs maybe—nice polished logs with shoes stuck on the ends. And her teeth … they were a freshly painted picket fence, but a really tiny fence for something like a miniature diorama.
My friends seemed to accept that she was a real beauty, but I’m not sure that they were left with a clearer picture of her, and that is my fault. I guess I’m just not that kind of writer.
I wouldn’t make for a great food critic either, as I’ve been known to simply describe things I find delicious using what I call a “nouny” (or nounly), where you adjectivize a word to describe itself in a kind of autobiographical shortcut, saying of a steak that it is particularly “steaky,” for example—the creative equivalent of describing chocolate as “chocolaty.”
Fortunately, I’ve always been pretty good at listening to people and being genuinely interested in them and their lives, and (part of) my career is basically writing stories about interesting people, or at least people doing interesting things, and you don’t have to be all that creative to do that—you just have to be able to help them tell their story, which I am ok at.
In any case, at this point my writing probably is what it is. I can try hard to think up really great similes and metaphors and descriptions, but it always feels like a hiccup when I pause for too long. I think the best writing I’ve done is the kind that just rolls, like a fat panda down a grassy hill, or a boat sliding off a trailer into the water, or when you take a potato from the potato pile at the grocery store, but you take a load bearing potato and they all tumble down because you’re an idiot. I might be improving a little bit, or at least evolving style-wise, but mostly what remains is to simply write as Adamly as I’m able.
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