There are many words which are notoriously hard to define. Pornography is the obvious example, a word that stumped even a Supreme Court justice ("I know it when I see it").

Here's a word that I have trouble defining: corny. An online dictionary defines it:

dull and tiresome but with pretensions of significance or originality

I have been thinking about this because I recently finished a very disappointing novel by an author I usually like. I'm not going to name the book or the author, because that would get in the way of the point I want to make.

This author never met a metaphor or similie s/he didn't fall deeply in love with. His/her imagery is always packed full of comparisons. In this novel, I counted six in one short paragraph. Now, imagery is an important tool for any writer. There is great power in drawing an apt but unexpected comparison. The problem is that this author has lost perspective, and s/he's fallen head first into a big old vat of Corny.

Here's a paraphrase of the sentence that made me put down the book: "Heat rose off Max's skin in the shape of his soul."

Corny is the word that comes to mind, but when I look at this in relation to the definition quoted above, I see a logical gap. Because this isn't dull or tiresome. Worse. It's meant to be observant and profound, but it's just silly. Self-conscious and awkward are two other words that come to mind.

Everybody has a bad sentence now and then. I've got more than a few of my own, scattered through my books. My leaning is to be generous and overlook this kind of misstep, which I would have done here, if this sentence hadn't come near the end of a book riddled with an excess of images and metaphors. By the time I got to this one, my patience was at the breaking point.

So here's the bottom line. If you're writing about serious things and it's important to get the reader to empathize and identify with the emotions your characters are feeling, step back. Don't force images in delicate situations. Don't make the reader stop in mid sentence to contemplate, as in this case. What went through my mind:

What shape is a soul, anyway? And what shape is heat? Are they really similar in shape, given the fact that one is an abstract concept and the other a fact of physics? Is this character sweating his soul out, and if so, what does that say about him? Or maybe she doesn't mean soul. Maybe there's some other meaning of the word I'm unfamiliar with. Because I just can't see this soul-shaped heat thing he's got going on, unless maybe it's something like body odor. When you've been camping for a week, no showers, and the stink feels like an overcoat, that I understand. But this soul business.... where was I in this story, anyhow?

My advice: back away from the extraneous metaphor. The story you save may be your own.