similes
I happen to believe that he can write a simile, but like most people who write well and think about writing, he's afraid of them. Similes and metaphors are scary, because they go bad so easily. Without much work at all, a simile will slide into the dreaded realm of the cliché, and once you start thinking about clichés, they crowd out every other thought in your head. Fresh as a blank. Uglier than blank. Slicker than blank. Hotter than blank.
A cliché is what it is because it works. What is hotter than hell, after all? The comparison fits all our cultural conditioning so well that it seems impossible to improve on it. If you set out to top hotter than hell, you're likely to produce something awkward and contorted.
What I try to do is not think about the mechanics. I let my subconscious handle such things. Look, say I to my subconscious, how my paragraphs are getting farther and farther apart. Something is wrong with the formatting. They are scurrying away from each other on the page. At that point, my subsconscious provided the feuding sisters. If I had made a conscious effort to come up with a simile, it never would have worked.
This is not to say that it's a wonderful or perfect simile; it's just an example of how this particular comparison came into being.
Like humor, a good simile is dependent, to some degree, on lateral thinking. Edward de Bono has published most widely on this term he coined. Lateral thinking is about flexing the way your mind works; it's about the mechanics of creativity. One of the ways he illustrates the whole concept (from his website):
"You cannot dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper"When I was first reading de Bono's work on lateral thinking I noticed the best examples in the way comics work. Watch a really excellent, very fast comic like Robin Williams and you'll see it again and again. A sentence starts, and should lead, by experience and perception, to one of several possible conclusions, but the comic makes a turn. Just a slight turn, maybe no more than thirty degrees, and ends up somewhere else. The turn takes you by surprise: hence, humor. Stale old jokes show this, too.
This means that trying harder in the same direction may not be as useful as changing direction. Effort in the same direction (approach) will not necessarily succeed.
Take my wife.
When somebody says, "Take my wife," you think of this, generally, as a conventional way of starting an anecdote, with an example. "Take my wife, for example. She never forgets a birthday." But the comic makes a 90 degree turn:
Please.
Freud said that all humor was based in the confounding of expectations, and that's what lateral thinking is about. Lateral thinking works for writers as well as for comics, and not just to be funny. It's a way to find an unusual turn of phrase or a fresh comparison.
Here's another example: he's got a mind like a steel blank. You expect the cliché steel trap, meaning something fast and sharp and merciless. If you get instead: he's got a mind like a steel sieve, you've made a 90 degree turn from the expected, escaped from the feared cliché, and hopefully made an impression on the reader.
The trick is learning how to think laterally. I'm only successful at it for a small portion of the time. If I practiced, I could probably be much more amusing at parties and write more interesting similes. So, I'm sure, could you.