Novel

Are you a future novelist? Take heart from these analogies and metaphors found in school essays.

Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two other sides gently compressed by a thigh master.

His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a tumbledryer without a sheet of Bounce.

He spoke with wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

She grew on him like E. coli and he was room temperature wafer thin honey roast ham.

She had a deep throaty genuine laugh like that sound a dog makes just before he throws up.

Her vocabulary was as bad, as, like, whatever.

He was a tall as a six foot three inch tree.

The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge free hole in the wall ATM.

The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.

McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie surreal quality, like when you’re on holiday in another TV region and Millionnaire comes on at 7 pm instead of 7:30.

Her hair glistened in the rain like nose hair after a sneeze.

The hailstones leaped up off the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

Long separated by cruel fate, the star crossed lovers raced across a grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, on having left Coventry at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Hull at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.

John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the east river.

Even in his last years, Gramps had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.

Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

Young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

"Oh, Jason, take me!" she panted, her breasts heaving like a college freshman on £1-a-beer night.

He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame. Maybe from stepping on a landmine or something.

The Ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a lamp-post.

It was an English tradition, like fathers chasing kids with power tools.

He was deeply in love when she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a lorry backing up.

She was as easy as the TV guide crossword.

Her eyes were like limpid pools, only they had forgotten to put in any pH cleanser.

She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.

Her voice had that tense grating quality, like a thermal paper fax machine that needed a band tightening.

It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.