I’m not gifted at writing metaphors. They don’t come naturally; I have to think long and hard to come up with a good one. But I love reading them. And I’m always impressed by readers who are good at writing them. Here are a few that I’ve come across recently:

From Laura Fraser’s travel memoir, All Over The Map: “From the air, Savai’i seems much bigger and wilder than Upolu, matted with rain forests, its jagged ridge of volcanic craters raised like the backbone of a dark and ancient sea monster.” And another: “He helps me off with my jacket and his sure, gentlemanly touch makes popcorn explode under my skin.” I love both of these images—the dark and ancient sea monster and the popcorn exploding under the skin—because they’re both so perfect and because I never would have come up with them on my own.

What makes a good metaphor is that it not only conjures an image, but that it is unique. If we’ve heard it before, or something similar, it’s not unique. Sometimes metaphors are so tenuously related to the noun they describe that I never would have made the association on my own. And yet that is what makes them unique. For example, in How Fiction Works, James Wood quotes Virigina Woolf’s The Waves: “The day waves yellow with all its crops.” The day waves yellow! I think it takes a poet’s sensibility to come up with something like that. As Wood puts it, “The secret lies in the decision to avoid the usual images of crops waving.”

From Gretel Erlich’s Solace: “Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons.” I love that line, although it’s a bit more difficult to get my head around than “the day waves yellow” or “popcorn exploding under the skin” because, well, verbs don’t conjugate, do they? People conjugate verbs. So I get caught up in trying to understand the exact meaning of the sentence. But I still love it.

And from the first page of Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: “The December yard is gray and scratchy, the trees calligraphic”—the scratchy yard! The calligraphic trees! Fabulous! And can’t you just see them? Both of them? And on page four, Eggers describes his mother’s cancer: “It was staring out at them, at the doctors, like a thousand writhing worms under a rock, swarming, shimmering, wet and oil—Good God!” More than a physical description, an emotion is conveyed—the horror of this thing growing inside his mother, like a thousand slimy worms.

From Augusten Burroughs’ Running With Scissors: “He had the loving, affectionate, outgoing personality of petrified wood” and “This makes everything she says sounds like it went through a curling iron.” Both brilliant descriptions!

I could go on and on, but you get the picture. The trick is to come up with metaphors that are original, that the reader hasn’t heard before, and that convey either an image, a feeling, or both. The metaphor has to compare the noun to something ordinary, something that we’re all familiar with and can picture (like a curling iron), not something obscure or abstract.

So how does one learn to write great metaphors? You go to metaphor school, of course. No, really, I don’t know. You practice, like you practice any writing skill. You take an ordinary description, like snow hanging heavy on a branch or the ruler-straight bangs of your first grade teacher, and you practice writing it more originally. And you practice and practice until you develop a “knack” for writing metaphors. Listen to me, I sound like I know what I’m talking about!

What about you? How do you come up with original metaphors/similes? Do you have any favorites from other books? Or authors who are particularly good at writing them?

And now, before it’s Tuesday, our Memoir Monday topic of the week: Do You Have a Story To Tell? My short answer to this question is yes, of course, everyone has a story to tell, and everyone should write it down—if for nothing more than for your progeny. (A couple of years ago I dug up a copy of my grandfather’s memoirs and edited them, had them laid out, and had them perfect bound for my dad for his 80th birthday. It’s so fun to read about his life in the teens and 20s—almost a hundred years ago today!)

But is your story interesting enough to get published? That’s a very different question. My feeling is this: ANY story can be interesting enough to get published if told the right way. You can make sitting on a tree stump all day interesting if you can write well enough. Look at The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the story of a man’s life after a stroke, during which he can only communicate by blinking his left eye. Not a whole lot of action in that story, and it’s BEAUTIFUL. More recently, look at Melanie Gideon’s The Slippery Year—as she put it in a New York Times article, a book about nothing. But it’s hilarious. Another example someone blogged about recently: Annie Dillard’s memoir, An American Childhood. No tragedy, no abuse, just a good old fashioned happy childhood.

Let’s take a quick look at some of the memoirs that have come out in the past ten years and how/why they were successful:

This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff—already a famous author
The Liar’s Club by Mary Carr—growing up in a family of “liars and drunks”
Name All The Animals by Alison Smith—story of the aftermath of her brother’s death
A Million Little Pieces by James Frey—story of a drug addict, but largely fabricated
The Boys of My Youth by Jo Anne Beard—a exquisitely written collection of essays about nothing and everything
Lucky by Alice Siebold—story of the author’s rape—gained popularity after publication of The Lovely Bones
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers—raises his brother after both of his parents die
Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt—grew up in extreme poverty
Jesus Land by Julia Scheeres—exiled with her adopted black brother to a Dominican Republican reform school
An Education by Lynn Barber—already a famous journalist
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami—already a famous author
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls—raised by crazy parents
Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs—raised by crazy parents
Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert—a je ne sais quoi that struck a chord with the public
Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson—timely with Afghanistan in the news
Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott—already a famous author
The Slippery Year by Melanie Gideon—a very funny book that rode on the coat tails of Eat, Pray, Love
A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah—author was one of the lost boys of Sudan

I don’t mean to diminish the quality of the memoirs by famous authors like Haruki Murakami and Anne Lamott, but really, if any old Joe had written a memoir about his running routine, no one would have published it. Many of these memoirs are about extraordinary childhoods—rape, poverty, abuse, early death, and crazy parents. Two were timely in that Afghanistan and the lost boys of Sudan were in the news. The Boys of My Youth and An Education are two in which nothing extraordinary happens, although Lynn Barber’s close relationship with Penthouse Magazine puts her in the celebrity category. That leaves three books of those I listed—The Boys of My Youth; Eat, Pray, Love; and The Slippery Year—that sold either because the writing was extraordinary or the story somehow struck a chord with the public. This is NOT to say that the writing isn’t equally extraordinary in books like A Heartbreaking Work, but the others have the added advantage of having either a) a famous author or b) a tragic/extraordinary story to tell. As I mentioned above, The Boys of My Youth is exquisite. The Slippery Year is hilarious, and Eat, Pray, Love somehow just worked. And parts of it were very funny. But all these books sold before the publishing industry fell apart.

The good news is that the memoir is still alive and kicking. If you go to Barnes & Noble, there is table dedicated to memoirs in addition to the memoir and autobiography bookshelves. At my local Pegasus, too, there is a memoir bookshelf right up front next to the fiction and nonfiction bookshelves.

If you take a look at Publisher’s Marketplace, the memoirs that are selling now are mostly written by celebrities, with a smattering of harrowing stories about overcoming the odds. You don’t find many about housewives raising small children or chefs working at restaurants—ordinary people doing ordinary things.

A quick look at what’s sold recently:

Gary Marshall’s memoir (famous)
Memoir of an Afghan-American interpreter (timely)
Story about working on an oyster farm (nothing extraordinary about that)
Story about underground street musicians (interesting but not extraordinary)
TV star memoir (famous)
Memoir of bomb disposal officer in Afghanistan and Iraq (timely for two reasons: because Afghanistan and Iraq are in the news and because of The Hurt Locker, which won the Oscar for best picture.)
Ron Reagan’s memoir (famous)
Memoir about Hurricane Katrina (timely)
New Orleans Saints quarterback memoir (famous and timely)
Nobel Peace Prize winner memoir (famous and timely)

You get the picture. Aside from the oyster farm and street musician memoirs, all the others are either written by someone famous or related to a story recently in the news. So if you’re worried your life story isn’t interesting enough to write about, ask yourself this. How important is it to you that it get published? Would you be happy having written it if it never does? My answer to this question was yes, I wanted to write it whether it got published or not. That said, I REALLY want it to get published. So the next step is figuring out how to package it, and market it, to fit one of the above categories: famous, timely, or one helluva good story.