The novel I am reading now has several instances of quite clever metaphors. By choosing a poetic phrase the author lends atmonsphere in a way that makes the observant reader sigh with satisfaction.
For instance, "his mood was gray as the ashes of a burned out house". This is not one the author actually used, but it has a feel of her better metaphors. A gray mood is dour enough but to evoke a burned house layers on even more somberness.
The trouble is that it is possible that an author will try this once too often. That is the case in the book I am reading. I had to stop and puzzle when she said of a character that "his confidence was shredding like cabbage". Huh? Cabbage doesn't shred. It is quite firm and taut in fact. You have to act on the cabbage in a specific way to make it become shredded. You cannot even pick up a cabbage and shred it, not without a knife. So if the young man's confidence is in shreds, I want to know who did it and with what knife.
Maybe another reader will accept the metaphor, a simile in this case, and read on. I find one aspect of having become a novelist is that this sort of thing stops me dead. It has to, as reading and editing my own work requires that I stop at every proverbial red light.. or flag.
If it makes other authors feel better about some of their own fractured metaphors I will tell you the author of this novel is a terrific writer, loved and honored far and wide. I have no desire to mock her for her self-shredding cabbages, but it makes me somehow less severe with my own feet of clay.
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