Character Description
Metaphor is a quick and effective way of delineating character. When the description is provided by another person, it can be doubly effective: delineating the speaker as well as the subject. When the metaphor is clearly hyperbolic, metaphor as character description reaches peak efficiency:
“Denny is a psycho. He gets worse all the time. He flunked third grade, so he’s really old enough to be in junior high.”
Visual Shortcut
Likewise, a simile is a very efficient way to create a shortcut to helping reader visualization. This novel is about “magic candy” and so one of the characters mentions an invention called “Proxy Dust.” The easiest way to convey this image is for another character to reply:
“Looks like a Pixie Stick.”
Appearances
Appearances are deceiving in this story and—to make matters more complicated—mirrors play a huge role. This duality is perhaps most succinctly accomplished with the following observation by the narrator:
“He placed his hand against the mirror, which from his current perspective looked like a window.”
Humor
Metaphor is also a wonderfully inventive way to introduce a little humor. This is another example of metaphor as character description, but notice that while the above description of a “psycho” is fairly straightforward and obviously an overstatement, only reading to this point in the story will reveal whether that is true here:
“Summer was a mindless fudge zombie!”
Visual Punctuation
Sometimes a good visual image through simile is less a shortcut than a punctuation mark. Rather than just quickly conveying an image in order to avoid longer descriptive prose, in this case the simile comes after the effects of the comparison have already been described.
“Wow, it feels like you’re made of Styrofoam!”
