The best metaphor?

"Game Over is my favourite thing about playing video games. Actually, I should qualify that. It's the split second before Game Over that's my favourite thing. Streetfighter II - an oldie but a goldie - with Leo controlling Ryu. Ryu's his best character because he's a good all-rounder - great defensive moves, pretty quick, and once he's on an offensive roll he's unstoppable. Theo's controlling Blanka. Blanka's faster than Ryu, but he's really good on attack. The way to win with Blanka is to get in the other player's face and just let up. Flying kick, leg-sweep, spin attack, head-bite. Daze them into submission. Both players are down to the end of their energy bars. One more hit and they're down, so they're both being cagey. They're hanging back at opposite ends of the screen, waiting for the other guy to make the first move. Leo takes the initiative. He sends off a fireball to force Theo into blocking, then jumps in with a flying kick to knock Blanka's green head off. But as he's moving through the air he hears a soft tapping. Theo's tapping the punch button on his control pad. He's charging up an electricity defence so that when Ryu's foot makes contact with Blanka's head it's going to be Ryu who gets KO'd with 10,000 volts charging through his system. This is the split second before Game Over. Leo's heard the noise. He knows he's @!#$_ed. He has time to blurt, 'I'm toast,' before Ryu is lit up and thrown backwards across the screen, flashing like a Christmas tree, a charred skeleton. Toast. The split second is the moment you comprehend you're just about to die. Different people react to it in different ways. Some swear and rage. Some sigh or gasp. Some scream. I've heard a lot of screams over the twelve years I've been addicted to video games. I'm sure that this moment provides a rare insight into the way people react just before they really do die. The games tap into something pure and beyond affectations. As Leo hears the tapping he blurts, 'I'm toast.' He says it quickly, with resignation and understanding. If he were driving down the M1 and saw a car spinning into his path I think he'd react in the same way." from 'The Beach' by Alex Garland

Alex Garland. hm. thank you for that, Funky! now, as writing is what we're all about on this site, i want to say why i think that extract is a bad piece of writing, and then you, or anyone else who cares to, can tell me what its good qualities are. what is the simile/metaphor on offer here? well, according to Garland, that point before death in a human life is a bit like the point before death in the life of a computer game character. of course, as we are in the Boy's Own world of Alex Garland, we're not talking death in the normal sense here, not death in the way that most of us will die - slowish, painfulish, probably cancer. no, we're talking glamorous motorway pile-up death, the kind of death that Morrissey wished on the writer of 'Morrissey and Marr: The Severed Alliance'. so, how far does this take us? what has it added? lovers of computer games will no doubt lovingly recognise the computer characters. some specialist interest for computer game lovers there then. but is it true? would my subjective apprehension of my own death just seconds before it happens be similar IN ANY WAY to the utterance "toast!" with concomitant Christmas tree light flashings (and do Christmas trees flash?) visuals, a subjective experience which is garnered FROM THE OUTSIDE by the player of the game? all i could think of when i read this extract was that ad (for Sega?) with its catchphrase 'Dare to live' or 'Live the dream' or something like that, the nuance being that playing a computer game was 'more like life than life.' in point of fact, playing a computer game is nothing like life (or anything else, for that matter). all that playing a computer game is like is playing a computer game. we play it at one remove from the character we're playing. unfortunately, in life, we are not at one remove from the character. we ARE the character. if we die in a motorway crash, we do not watch ourselves die. we do not see ourselves flying across the screen, lit up like a Christmas tree, shouting "toast!". we do it. we live it. it's us that does the flying (and the dying). Garland's simile then, in my view, tells us absolutely nothing. it adds absolutely nothing, except perhaps for the modern conecit that we want life to be as like a computer game as possible - something we can control, something we can die in, and then get up and walk away from. life (and death, perhaps especially death) is trickier, and deserves more demanding metaphors and similes. in my view, it deserves something closer to what life's actually like. it deserves something closer to the truth.

Yeah I dig what you're saying chant. Was drunk last night and it seemed like a good metaphor/simile at the time. Didn't think about the cancer slow painful death thing. I'am just a saddo who's hooked on videogames. Will try hard not to use videogames in anymore of my future metaphors/similes. I'am a terrible writer man, you have to remember that. I found a better metaphor/simile for you though chant, which paints an interesting idea of our world - it's a bit long but worth it: " 'And a movie is like a lifetime, Don, is that right?' 'Yes.' 'Then why would anyone choose a bad lifetime, a horror movie?' 'They not only come to the horror movie for fun, they know it is going to be a horror movie when they walk in,' he said. 'But why?...' 'Do you like horror films?' 'No.' 'But some people spend a lot of money and time to see horror, or soap-opera problems that to other peole are dull and boring?...' He left the question for me to answer. 'Yes.' 'You don't have to see their films and they don't have to see yours. That is called freedom.' 'But why would anybody want to be horrified? Or bored?' 'Because they think they deserve it for horrifying somebody else, or they like the excitement of horrification, or that boring is the way they think films have to be. Can you believe that lots of people for reasons that are very sound to them enjoy believing that they are helpless in their own films? No, you can't.' 'No, I can't,' I said. 'Until you understand that, you will wonder why some people are unhappy. They are unhappy because they have chosen to be unhappy, and, Richard, that is all right!' 'Hm.' 'We are game-playing, fun-having creatures, we are the otters of the universe. We cannot die, we cannot hurt ourselves any more than illusions on the screen can be hurt. But we can believe we're hurt, in whatever agonizing detail we want. We can believe we're victims, killed and killing, shuddered around by good luck and bad luck.' 'Many lifetimes?' I asked. 'How many movies have you seen?' 'Oh' 'Films about living on this planet, about living on other planets; anything that's got space and time is all movie and all illusion,' he said. 'But for a while we can learn a huge amount and have a lot of fun with our illusions, can we not?' 'How far do you take this movie thing, Don?' 'How far do you want? You saw the film tonight partly because I wanted to see it. Lots of people choose lifetimes because they enjoy doing things together. The actors in the film tonight have played together in other films - before or after depends on which film you've seen first, you can also see them at the same time on different screens. We buy tickets to these films, paying admission by agreeing to believe in the reality of space and the reality of time... Neither one is true, but anyone who doesn't want to pay that price cannot appear on this planet, or in any space-time system at all.' 'Are there some people who don't have any lifetimes at all in space-time?' 'Are there some people who never go to movies?' 'I see. They get their learning in different ways?' 'Right you are,' he said, pleased with me. 'Space-time is a fairly primitive school. But a lot of people stay with the illusion even if it is boring, and they don't want the lights turned on early.' 'Who writes these movies Don?' 'Isn't it strange how much we know if only we ask ourselves instead of somebody else? Who writes these movies, Richard?' 'We do,' I said. 'Who acts?' 'Us.' 'Who's the cameraman, the projectionist, the theater manager, the ticket-taker, the distibuter, and who watches them all happen? Who is free to walk out in the middle, any time, change the plot whenever, who is free to see the same film over and over again?' 'Let me guess,' I said. 'Anybody who wants to?' 'Is that enough freedom for you?' he said. 'And is that why movies are so popular? That we instinctively know they are a parallel of our own lifetimes?' 'Maybe so... maybe not. Doesn't matter much, does it? What's the projector?' 'Mind,' I said. 'No imagination. It's our imagination, no matter what you say.' 'What's the film?' he asked. 'Got me.' 'Whatever we give our consent to put into our imagination?' 'Maybe so, Don.' 'You can hold a reel of film in your hands,' he said,'and it's all finished and complete - beginning, middle, end are all there that same second, the same millionths of a second. The film exists beyond the time that it records, and if you know what the movie is, you know generally what's going to happen before you walk into the theater: there's going to be battles and excitement, winners and losers, romance, disaster; you know that's all going to be there. But in order to get caught up and swept away in it, in order to enjoy it to its most, you have to put it in a projector and let it go through the lens minute by minute... any illusion requires space and time to be experienced. So you pay your nickel and you get your ticket and you settle down and forget what's going on outside the theater and the movie begins for you.' " From: 'Illusions - The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah. by Richard Bach

When Margaret Thatcher said to Philip Larkin that she liked his poetry he challenged her to recite a line of his. She came up with: 'Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives'. No surprises in the Ironic Lady's choice of metaphor.

Dead as a doornail. Kicked the bucket. etc.

um, well, Funky... *Chant doesn't know what to say.* no, Chant does know what to say. Chant thinks he's read pieces by F.S. which are better than either of the things on offer here. i mean, Funky, without going into a detailed examination of the metaphor on offer - that life is like a film, but a film that, outside of time, we've chosen to live, not watch, and then eased our way into - just look at that dialogue. JESUS, FUNKY, LOOK AT IT!! do you know anyone who talks like that? i don't even know philosophy professors who talk like that! it reads like a self-help manual, for f.uck's sake! now in this thread, we're talking about style. and style is half the battle. or style is the whole battle, in the view of a writer like Nabokov. so don't take your eye off the ball - just because you like the message, just because the IDEA rubs you up the right way, shouldn't prevent you from coolly analysing how the idea has been presented. and the way it's been presented here isn't great. you can, of course, have similes and metaphors with film and computer game. but similes and metaphors are complicated, difficult things to get right. they depend on a lot of well thought out correspondences. they depend on being really thought through. hell, i never touch the things, because they're too difficult for me. but that's why i'm just an amateur writer. i expect (and demand) higher standards from professionals.

i speak like that......

I would have to say that I bought The Tessaract by Garland and thought it was astonishingly badly-written, almost hack-work. It was all showy locations and quirky people but there was not a sentence in it with any heart. Reminded me a bit of Guy Ritchie, he was so enamoured of looking flash and busy and next-big-thing that he forgot to put any emotional core into it. I have to agree with Chant on the analysis of the death metaphor. Firstly Chant gets very quickly to the heart of it, 98% of people don't die like that - in a sudden and "oh god, here comes my death" sort of way - if you want to stick with the toast image, it is much more like waiting for toast to pop up and only noticing after the event that it has been done for a minute or two. Secondly - even if you do want to use a video-game image and be there with the zeitgeist, Jesus. Street-Fighter ? He may as well have said Double Dragon or Outrun - how many years has it been since people played Streetfighter and experienced anything other than boredom or ironic detachment ? And third - it isn't even accurate. The whole piece is about Game Over, but you can't go with a fighting game for that imagery, because the point is after your character loses a fighting game one of two things happen :- 1) the other fighter celebrates victory in a little animated routine or 2) the Continue ? 10,9, 8, 7 routine begins. Does this matter, am I being retentive ? No, it doesn't matter, unless you are writing that the character saying it has been addicted to video-games for 12 years. The whole image doesn't work. As to the second one - the issue is not just who talks like that, but who listens like that ? The second character says hardly anything and has to listen to paragraph after paragraph of clunky dialogue and never responds with anything human. Much better is the Men Behaving Badly sequence with the two men philosophising in the bar and just getting in the way of each other's train of thought.

do you? quite apart from the length and complexity of some of these passages of speech, take a look at this phrase: 'But for a while we can learn a huge amount and have a lot of fun with our illusions, can we not?' now, do you really mean to say that you use the ultra-formal phrase 'can we not?'? Jesus, not even Lord f.ucking Windlesham uses 'can we not?'. we say 'can't we?' when we talk. the problem here is that the characters aren't characters, they're corpses. they're just a couple of stiffs being used as a mouthpiece for the author. if the author intended to imitate Plato, to reproduce a Socratic dialogue, then he's going along the right lines. but if he's writing a novel...well.

Shuffled off... Popped 'er clogs... Snuffed it...

as mad as chocolate bananas ))))))

I think the worst simile/strained image (which sprang to my mind when I read that Richard Bach line "We are the otters of the universe. We cannot die" erm, yes, we can and so can otters) is Nelly Furtado :- "I'm like a bird / I can only fly away / I don't know where my home is / I don't know where my soul is" Erm, you can't only fly away - you could walk, or run, but not fly. Birds can fly away and come back, otherwise baby birds would not get fed and would perish. Birds do know where their home is - see last sentence and also homing pigeons are noted for it. I accept that they may not know where their soul is, and neither apparently does Nelly, but it is not the most direct comparison I've ever seen. In short Nelly, in the ways you describe, you are not "like a bird" in any real sense.

While still sticking the knife into Garland, I bought a collection of short stories by various people called "The New Puritans", which featured stories about all manner of ordinary people doing everyday but interesting things, but the one that stood out as not being in the right place was Garland's, which was about a photographer at Monaco Grand Prix watching a glamorous couple well, couple, in the crowd. I have the feeling that Garland pretends he is James Bond when he is on his own.

OH PLEASE DON'T GET ME STARTED ON SONG LYRICS! I realise that nobody expects someone writing a dance track to win the booker prize but the fact that they have bothered to write something means they wanted to put some words in the piece... "oh tell me why, do we build castles in the sky oh tell me why, are the catsles way up high" WE DON'T!! IF WE DID, THEY'D BE 'WAY UP HIGH' BECAUSE THEY'D BE IN THE SKY!!! worse still are songs that aren't cosily sitting behind the dance/trance/it-doesn't-really-matter-about-the-words because-you're-supposed-to-be-mashed-when-you-listen-to-it-banner. Songs that are actually meant to be taken in and listenend to. All saints (a collection of not particularly talented, average looking women) have a line in the intro to one of their most famous songs, "all the questions I have to find" IT'S THE ANSWERS YOU HAVE TO FIND, YOU ALREADY HAVE THE BLOODY QUESTIONS!

the same song goes "the alphabet runs right from A to Zee" NO! really? what, right the way through all those letter thingy's? you're kidding! well that really helps me to understand the pain and sense of loss you're feeling about the break up of your relationship. there is no reference whatsoever to the alphabet and this line is totally out of context. They just sat there and thought, "hmmm, we need a rhyme here" they might as well have said, "I've heard Rolf Harris drinks his own wee" or "United Dairies helped Ackrington Stanley" it's just thrown in there for no reason at all! HAVE A CARE PLEASE! you don't have to be Wordsworth but if you're going to write a song or a poem then the least that can be expected is that you're actually aware of what you've written.

sorry to go on but I've just realised that the line before it is "sometimes vocabulary runs right through me" It's a shame they don't have a sense of irony as that would make it a superb bit of writing! It obviously runs "right through" and doesn't bother to stop on the way.

I'm sure this is Eric's place, not mine, but is that not a simile? Anyway, for either, you can't beat P G Wodehouse.

Just as long as they only things you're holding down are the pages of your book, Em. Here are a few from Lucky Jim. This is still the best description of a hangover I've ever read: “Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.”

Okay i don't really talk like that i just felt like being annoying....sorry

Not exactly metaphors, but I love these two: Cher was not built in a day. The road to hell waits for no man.

I got an e-mail once from someone who liked one of my metaphors in my novel. It describes the back end of a pit bull terrier as looking like Pinocchio holding his breath. I was proud of it at the time and it was great to have someone take the time to write to me about it.

Gaiman's one is a bit kitsche for me. sorry Emily! the K.A. one is a classic though, Tom. metaphors and similes - homelands of the poet. here are a couple in perhaps my favourite poem by Philip Larkin. On longer evenings, Light, chill and yellow, Bathes the serene Foreheads of houses. A thrush sings, Laurel-surrounded In the deep bare garden, Its fresh-peeled voice Astonishing the brickwork. It will be spring soon, It will be spring soon - And I, whose childhood Is a forgotten boredom, Feel like a child Who comes on a scene Of adult reconciling, And can understand nothing But the unusual laughter, And starts to be happy.

'his face was like a balloon full of spanners' (stormy) - simile. ''he is an ass; love's meteor. A poisoned apple passed on from generation to generation.' (McGough) - metaphor. I used to get confused by this but have been trying to learn recently. A simile is when you draw a comparison BETWEEN the subject and something else and a metaphor is when you write about the subject as if it WERE something else.

It's not a metaphor, a similie, but this one made me laugh. Can't remember it word for word, and can't trace the book (in a big box somewhere in this flat...) '...his tongue was as flacid as a spent penis.' - James Herbert, 'Creed'. Callum

Once again I cite Homer's Iliad or Odyssey for an unbelievable amount of metaphors. 'As a leopard comes out of a dense thicket to face a huntsman, and has no fear in her heart or thought of flight when she hears the barking of dogs; and if the man hits her first with a thrust or cast of his weapon, even though she is pierced through with his spear she does not slacken her fighting until she is upon him, or brought down herself; so the son of Antenor, godlike Agenor would not run before making trial of battle with Achilleus.' Phew!

The night was thick, I opened it like curtains on a stage.