clear sensuous image—it isolates the attribute by making the reader’s mind form an abstraction. The reader’s lightning-like visualization of the whiteness of snow and the whiteness of sugar makes that whiteness stand out in his mind as if he had seen it.
When you select a comparison, you must consider not only the exact attribute you want to feature, but also the connotations that will be raised in the reader’s mind. For instance, the old bromide “Her lips were like ripe cherries” was not bad when said the first time. Cherries connote something red, sensuous, glistening, and attractive. But suppose I said: “Her lips were like ripe tomatoes.” Tomatoes are also red and shining, but the comparison sounds ridiculous because the connotations are wrong. Ripe tomatoes make you think of something squashy, of the kitchen, of an unappetizing salad. The things connected with the concept of a vegetable are not romantic.
If you want something to sound attractive, be sure to make your comparison glamorous and attractive. If you want to destroy something, do the opposite.
An example of the latter is the undignified comparison in my description of Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead: his ears “flared out in solitary nakedness, like the handles of a bouillon cup.” It would be bad writing to say “His ears stuck out like wings,” because the attribute described is unattractive, but a comparison to wings suggests something soaring and attractive. To bring connotations of something good into a derogatory description is the opposite mistake of comparing the lips of a beautiful woman to ripe tomatoes.
It is by means of the connotations of your comparisons that you can do the best objective slanted writing. By “objective,” I mean that the reader’s mind draws the conclusion—it is not you, the writer, who calls his attention to the fact that a certain person is ugly or undignified. To be objective, you have to show, not tell. You do it by selecting the connotations of your comparisons.
You can do the same with simple adjectives, which have definite connotations or shades of meaning. “The man was tall and slender” is an attractive description, whereas “He was tall, lanky, and gawky” is not. In description by means of comparisons, the field of selection is much wider, but the identical principle applies. You can describe the same quality as attractive or not according to what metaphors you use.
As a smaller matter, do not overload a paragraph with metaphors. Instead of making the description more colorful, this blunts the perception of the reader. He is lost among so many concretes out of different categories that they cease to work on him, and he has no impression left in his mind. It is like showing too many pictures too fast.
Above all, avoid two metaphors to describe the same thing. Sometimes, two clever images might occur to you to describe an object. You have to be ruthless and select the one you think is better. A repetition is always weakening; it has the effect of projecting the author’s doubt, his uncertainty that the first description is good enough.
Descriptions
I describe my characters at their first appearance. Since I want the reader to perceive the scene as if he were there, I indicate as soon as possible what the characters look like.
Sometimes I depart from this deliberately. In Atlas Shrugged, Wesley Mouch is not described in his introductory scene; I give him a few insipid lines and nothing more. The next time he is mentioned, as the new economic dictator of the country, I cash in on the fact that the reader, if he remembers him at all, remembers a total nonentity.
But my heroes and heroines I always describe at their introduction.
I decide how long a description should be by the nature of the buildup—by how much significance the context has prepared the reader to attach to a character.
In Atlas Shrugged, I prepare James Taggart’s description in the following manner. Eddie Willers has been thinking about the oak tree in his childhood and about his shock upon discovering that it was only the shell of its former strength. Then he comes to the Taggart building, and I describe that he feels the same about this building as he used to feel about the oak. And then he walks into the heart of the building, into the office of the president:
“James Taggart sat at his desk. He looked like a man approaching fifty, who had crossed into age from adolescence, without the intermediate stage of youth. He had a