Critique from a beta reader made me ditch my overdone metaphors

I had this beta reader tell me my first chapter had more similes than a poetry slam. She pointed out three in one paragraph and asked if the forest really needed to be described as 'a thousand whispering secrets.' I changed my approach after that, now I use one strong image per scene max. Anyone else have a reader call out a habit you didn't notice you had?

2 comments

2 Comments

felix14710d agoTop Commenter

Oh man, this is me to a tee. My first draft of my fantasy novel had a paragraph where the main character's eyes were compared to something different every page - ocean, storm clouds, gemstones, you name it. A beta reader just wrote "pick one and stick with it" in the margins and I felt so called out. It's funny how you don't see your own habits until someone points them out, like you're just typing on autopilot. That forest description you mentioned hurts extra cause I've probably written something similar myself. Now I do the same thing as you, one solid image per scene and I force myself to delete the rest. It makes the writing cleaner and the reader can actually focus on the story instead of counting how many times the moon is compared to a pearl.

william_carter10d ago

Five bucks says your beta reader missed a dozen other examples of the same habit in other scenes. Sometimes having a repeated image like "eyes like gemstones" can actually create a nice rhythm if you lean into it instead of erasing it. A reader noticing a comparison isn't always a bad thing, maybe it means the image is working.