Last but not least, here’s our prompt for the day (optional, as always). Hard-boiled detective novels are known for their use of vivid similes, often with an ironic or sarcastic tone. Novelist Raymond Chandler is particularly adept at these. Here are a few from his novels:
- A few locks of dry, white hair clung to his scalp, like wildflowers fighting for life on a bare rock.
- Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.
- From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.
- She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.
- He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.
Today, I’d like to challenge you to channel your inner gumshoe and write a poem in which you describe something with a hard-boiled simile. Feel free to use just one, or try to go for broke and stuff your poem with similes till it’s . . . as dense as bread baked by a plumber, as round as the eyes of a girl who wants you to think she’s never heard such language, and as easy to miss as a brass band in a cathedral.
Happy writing!
Thoroughly enjoyed writing for this prompt. I’m not sure how far I managed with writing hardboiled similies but here it is, my poem , ‘Leaving‘.
With this, we have just six more days to go before NaPoWriMo is done for this year.
She stood on the pavement, a pool of undisturbed water, watching the truck inch away like the minutes hand on a clock- her whole life fitted in a six by six feet container. Dragging her feet as a corpse heaved out of water, she returned to the empty box, that she once had called home and flung open the door - it looked like a temple looted; the nails still on the walls stood like observers of a calamity that cannot be evaded.She ripped them off one by one exposing unhealed wounds of courage and resilience. When she was done, she walked into each room one last time like a student checking the answer sheet before handing it over. A few unwanted papers and clothes lay strewn like the last remnants of flesh on a carcass. She paused for a breath and then turned off the lights. A blackness met her eye as if she were swimming in a pool of liquid tar. Turning around, she made her way to the entrance like a dog lapping up water on a smoldering day, and she shut the door. It closed with the finalty of a judge's gavel after the pronouncement of the verdict, 'Divorced'. Copyright@smithavishwanathsblog.com. All Rights Reserved.
Eúnoia 
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