Avoiding the Plague of a Bad Metaphor

The early summer sky was the color of cat vomit. Of course, Tally thought, you’d have to feed your cat only salmon-flavored cat food for a while, to get the pinks right.

—Uglies, Scott Westerfeld

If you grew up in the early 2000s or just never grew out of Young Adult (YA) fiction, you might be familiar with this opening line from Scott Westerfeld's first book in his series, Uglies.

I have found that a fair amount of people (including editors) tend to praise this choice of metaphor for its unique, well-crafted, attention-grabbing structure.

I do not. Here's why.

A metaphor is a comparison built to provoke our mind's eye. However, precisely for this reason, the metaphor should compliment the subject it's affecting—in other words, it needs to make sense. Saying that a character is a tank, for instance, might convey the idea that they are strong, sturdy, unstoppable, impenetrable, and/or destructive, because those are things we might associate with a tank.

So, when Tally describes the sky as cat vomit, the idea behind this imagery is that a cat threw up all over the sky.

Puke is not pretty. It's typically green or yellow, but since a lot of visuals for it are usually green, that's probably going to be the first colour of choice for the average reader.

Green is not a colour that normally appears in the atmosphere. It usually takes the formation of a tornado or other severe weather for this to happen. So, perhaps at this point, if Scott's intention was to make the audience discomforted and imagine an angry storm on the approach, this would be a very strong metaphor.

The second sentence is where it breaks down.

Now that you've constructed this brooding atmosphere in your head, it's torn away by the modifying conditions. Suddenly, the cat needs to eat salmon, and lots of it—so much so that its vomit needs to come out pink. That is one fed cat.

Had Scott been trying to establish the first idea about a distressing sky, perfect. But since he's actually conveying a sunset, the whole metaphor falls apart. A metaphor should not need to be explained—the chosen comparison should explain itself. This is why something like calling a character a tank works, but the opening to Uglies doesn't.

In the book's third sentence, Tally goes on to say that the clouds resemble fish scales. Since so much emphasis has gone into fish being necessary to create this sky, it would seem that a metaphor using salmon itself would have been a better choice than vomit. Perhaps not as graphic (though, this could be remedied with some creativity), but certainly a lot less frustrating and definitely more clear from the get-go. With how it stands, as a reader, it feels like we're being led around in circles by the ear: "Oh, it's this thing! Oh, wait, no, it's actually that!"

Compare this to the following excerpt from The Lord of the Flies by William Golding:

The sun in the west was a drop of burning gold that slid nearer and nearer the sill of the world.

Here, there are actually two metaphors that fall beautifully into place with the rhythm of the sentence. Do you hear the poetry? It breathes with each word.

By comparing the sun to something valuable such as gold, it likens the boys' fate to losing something of such value that it could be compared to gold—their morality. And with it sliding behind the 'sill' of the world, it appears that it will from that point forward remain out of reach.

What incredible foreshadowing.

This is the kind of insight a metaphor should achieve: simple, clear, vivid.

Jeannine