By Bill Derby
Below are excerpts from actual English creative writing courses. My guess is students were challenged with generating a story with a minimum number of words and needed extra stuff to include or they had been to a party the night before.
1. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.
2. She caught your eye like one of those pointy little hook latches that dangle from screen doors and fly up whenever you bang the door open.
3. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly like a bowling ball wouldn’t.
4. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty Bag filled with vegetable soup.
5. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and “Jeopardy” comes on at 7:00 instead of 7:30.
6. Her hair glistened in the rain like nose hair after a sneeze.
7. Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the center.
8. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.
9. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
10. He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.
11. The hailstones leaped from the pavement like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.
12. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.
13. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
14. The politician was gone but unnoticed, like the period after the Dr on a Dr Pepper can.
15. She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.
16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met
17. The thunder was ominous-sounding, much like the sound of a thin sheet of metal being shaken backstage during the storm scene in a play.
18. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
19. The red brick wall was the color of a brick-red Crayola crayon.
20. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River.
21. Her date was pleasant enough, but she knew that, if her life was a movie, this guy would be buried in the credits as something like “Second Tall Man.”
22. Her eyes were as blue as the ocean and her dress was as red as China in the 1950’s.
23. Her eyes were like limpid pools, only they had forgotten to put in any pH cleanser.
24. Bob was as perplexed as a hacker who meant to access T:flw.quid55328.com\aaakk/ch@ung but got T:\flw.quidaaakk/ch@ung by mistake.
25. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.
26. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.
27. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM.
