The phrase “My imagination doesn’t activate while reading” is gonna haunt me till the end of days.
There’s a whole bunch of other reasons a writer might use some kind of metaphorical language in describing something aside from just helping the reader visualize the thing.
Your own example in the op specifically brings to mind an old house that isn’t just past its prime but now probably ought to be knocked down or completely rebuilt from the foundation up. It also makes the reader consider either the elderly through their utility or objects as if they had some ideal essence or soul. Depending on the surrounding writing, one of these may serve to reenforce the tone of the work. Combining the imagery of the elderly and winter has a buttressing effect where the reader thinks now of the personified season, old man winter, as well. Finally, using winter and the elderly when describing an object conjures the cycle of death and rebirth.
So you ended up doing so much more than describing an old house. And when writers use a bunch of crazy descriptions and metaphor that’s what they’re trying to do too. There are lots of bad writers who do it laboriously or with awful prose, but there’s more to it than just making sure you have the right image of a dilapidated house in your head.
OP's not complaining about too much detail. They specifically complained about overuse of metaphor and simile shutting down their imagination, which I kinda get.
In their example, the second half of the sentence is kinda visually confusing. It's ambiguous if you're supposed to see a house, or an old guy, or an old guy's memories, or a blizzard.
Contrast it with @femicrat's Tolkein quote, which is mostly concrete details stated with simple language, despite the poetic feeling you get from it. There's only one simile, "Stone rings grinned out of the ground like broken teeth in the moonlight," and it's pretty unambiguous and easy to imagine. You know you're supposed to see stones in the ground and not someone's actual mouth and teeth.
you know to imagine stones in the ground and not someone’s actual mouth and teeth.
Tolkien was an Englishman
No wonder he chose that simile
It's just a storytelling tool. Whether or not it's good is a function of how the author uses it. Evocative imagery is good for conveying mood or action or demeanor.
literature would be better if prose was replaced with mechanistic direct descriptions actually
Jesus Christ, this thread is incredibly depressing tbh. This is like "the curtains were fucking blue" level shit.
I actually just finished The Road this morning. It was meh.
When a Salman Rushdie type or a Tom Robbins type goes all florid on you you can tell it's because they genuinely enjoy playing with language, which I respect even when it doesn't work (which is often enough, in the case of those two.) I doubt McCarthy would use the words 'enjoy' or 'playing' to describe any part of his process. He writes like a witch put a curse on his family three hundred years ago and the only way to lift it is to use every word in the English language at least once in a published novel.
He writes like a witch put a curse on his family three hundred years ago and the only way to lift it is to use every word in the English language at least once in a published novel.
That's some great visual imagery right there
He must have been (and still is?) a real asshole...
After marrying fellow student Lee Holleman in 1961, McCarthy "moved to a shack with no heat and running water in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains outside of Knoxville". There, the couple had a son, Cullen, in 1962. When writer James Agee's childhood home was being demolished in Knoxville that year, McCarthy used the site's bricks to build fireplaces inside his Sevier County shack.
While Lee cared for the baby and tended to the chores of the house, Cormac asked her to get a day job so he could focus on his novel writing. Dismayed with the situation, she moved to Wyoming, where she filed for divorce and landed her first job teaching.
McCarthy has not publicly revealed his political opinions.[92] A resident of Santa Fe with a traditionalist disposition, he once expressed disapproval of the city and the people there: "If you don't agree with them politically, you can't just agree to disagree—they think you're crazy."[21]
:side-eye-1:
Regarding his own literary constraints when writing novels, McCarthy said he is "not a fan of some of the Latin American writers, magical realism. You know, it's hard enough to get people to believe what you're telling them without making it impossible. It has to be vaguely plausible."
:stalin-gun-1::stalin-gun-2: No wonder he's been divorced three times lmao
I think they can be really add to a novel if done right, a good metaphor or simile can help set the scene and make the writing more evocative. It can also be a nice, subtle way to give the reader some insight into the POV character's emotional state without being too direct.
That being said, a bad metaphor really sticks out and makes the text actively worse to read.
All I can think of is that time Charles Dickens described a door knocker as "having not gone through any intermediate process of change."
You can really tell when someone's getting paid by the word.
Dickens saw himself as a sociologist though, so a lot of effusive descriptions are meant to capture a sociological phenomena or a nuance of London culture.
"Having not gone through any intermediate state of change" could tell you a few thing: the owner of the house adheres to an outmoded aesthetic, the owner couldn't afford to upgrade the exterior (maybe a minor aristocratic house in decline), or if the implication is that the knocker skipped a part of a larger change, it probably signifies that the house has been purchased by tasteless merchants and they just painted over an ancient knocker, or that the house has been purchased and remodeled a bunch of times but the knocker is brand new and sticks out.
But yeah he also published in serial format, so he was probably just trying to hit his word count a lot of times.
I've thought about this and seen threads like this before. I'm not sure what I think. All I've arrived at is "Sometimes I like descriptions that use metaphors and/or similes, and sometimes I don't". When they're good, they give me a window into the world as the characters perceive it, or as the author wants to convey it. When they're bad, it's like being trapped with someone who won't stop reading you their terrible poetry and refuses to take the hint that you're not interested.
Suddenly Tom's talk left the woods and went leaping up the young stream, over bubbling waterfalls, over pebbles and worn rocks, and among small flowers in close grass and wet crannies, wandering at last up on to the Downs. They heard of the Great Barrows, and the green mounds, and the stone-rings upon the hills and in the hollows among the hills. Sheep were bleating in flocks. Green walls and white walls rose. There were fortresses on the heights. Kings of little kingdoms fought together, and the young Sun shone like fire on the red metal of their new and greedy swords. There was victory and defeat; and towers fell, fortresses were burned, and flames went up into the sky. Gold was piled on the biers of dead kings and queens; and mounds covered them, and the stone doors were shut; and the grass grew over all. Sheep walked for a while biting the grass, but soon the hills were empty again. A shadow came out of dark places far away, and the bones were stirred in the mounds. Barrow-wights walked in the hollow places with a clink of rings on cold fingers, and gold chains in the wind. Stone rings grinned out of the ground like broken teeth in the moonlight.
-- J.R.R. Tolkien, "The Fellowship of the Ring"
Honestly I think GRRM's "style" is basically the same as Tolkien's, he just revels in the edgy bullshit and isn't nearly as good at writing in general. I like the style, though, and I think the criticism of their description of scenes is (in both cases) tiresome and overexaggerated.
Oh, that reminds me: Epic Rap Battles Of History: J. R. R. Tolkien vs George R. R. Martin.
It is from the dull part of the book, when the main characters are screwing around doing nothing, failing to advance the plot whatsoever and nothing is happening. No elves, no Aragorn, no Rohirrim. Tolkien vividly describes their meals, though.
For me that works because describing that meal is an interesting way of introducing the characters and showing what they are like
