Hyperbole
Hyperbole is the greatest invention in the history of mankind.
It is, isn’t it? I mean that hyperbole is the greatest invention in the history of mankind.
In writing, hyperbole is a figure of speech that uses intentional and obvious exaggeration to emphasize a point, evoke strong feelings, or create a strong impression. It is not intended to be taken literally by the reader.
That sounds too academic. Let’s try it again.
Think of hyperbole as the “drama queen” of writing. It’s when a writer tells a massive, over-the-top lie to help the reader understand a very simple truth.
That’s about right.
No, It really isn’t the greatest invention the history of mankind. That would be the coffee maker. Anyone who’s had a cup of coffee today knows that is not hyperbole, but absolute truth.
It is a strange thing to say something so clearly untrue for the sake of helping the reader see, in a sense, the opposite.
I use hyperbole in speeches for the same reasons.
Examples
“I have no wind, if you want to know the truth. I’m quite a heavy smoker, for one thing—that is, I used to be. They made me quit. I smoked about five million cigarettes a month.”
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951)
“A day was twenty-four hours long; but it seemed as if it would never end.”
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (1876)
“A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County.”
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
"The constant dripping of the rain... sounded like a million little drums."
Babe: The Gallant Pig by Dick King-Smith (1983)
Why It Works
Hyperbole creates contrast in the midst of a truth. Holden Caulfield, the protagonist in The Catcher in the Rye, smoked in excess, and that’s the truth he’s trying to impart. Did he smoke on average 161,290 cigarettes a day? No one thinks that. How many? That’s where it gets complicated.
When we use hyperbole, we fall into a kind of relativism. The reader imagines what counts as excess. I’m a non-smoker and always have been. I grew up in a home with two smoking parents. I endured a lot of second-hand smoke. For me, what counts as excess is lower than, say, what a pack a day smoker might think. They smoke 20 cigarettes a day for them, their starting point. What counts as excess must be significantly beyond 20 accordingly.
In the case of Holden Caulfield, his life was in extremes.
When the narrator in Babe: The Gallant Pig says, “The constant dripping of the rain... sounded like a million little drums,” It wasn't about extremes. It was about the poetics. The sensory feeling of rain dripping is both a matter of sound and feeling. The reader sense either, but the narrator is leading us to feel so much rain that were soaked and that the dripping so constantly that it’s just a wall of sound.
In both cases, it's about contrast, relativity and sameness.
Through exaggeration we can see how it's different than normal, whatever we define as normal, how same it is compared to our expectations.
Shock Me (and more)
They offer a little shock, causing the reader to think through what’s actually being said.
They also offer a chance to turn a phrase. Mark Twain writes, “A day was twenty-four hours long; but it seemed as if it would never end.” Anyone counting the hours recognizes it's already a long day. Most of us sleep through one third of it. How could be longer? Twain manages to get us to feel that length.
The Beatles sang,
Eight days a week
I love you.
Eight days a week
Is not enough to show I care.
Like Twain, they’ve exaggerated using days. They've added one. Just one. The singer is trying to declare how in love he is. An ordinary full day wasn't enough. As evidenced by the lyrics, eight days was not enough to get the job done either.
I Gotta Be Me
I grew up right next to Chicago. We have a particular way of speaking. Hyperboles are just part of the common parlance. Maybe some of these are used where you live as well.
"The Kennedy is a parking lot."
"The Bears haven't had a quarterback in a century."
"They put a mountain of giardiniera on this."
"It’s a thousand degrees below zero."
"I’ve been looking for a parking spot since 1995."
"I’ve been on the Red Line for an eternity."
When you are trying to write an authentic character, it's important to consider where they are from. Should you include the language the local people speak? It's important to the demographics correctly. People on the South side speak differently than on the north. Different things are important to them. Likewise, what's their socioeconomic status? Are they part of the University of Chicago World, or did they live closer to Marquette Park?
As you do, you'll want to avoid using too many of them so that it sounds like you're making them into a cartoon character like the SNL Superfans.
Be Funny
Humor isn’t always about the wit or one-liner. Colloquial phrasings are a great way to bring this in.
Think about the tall tales. How big was Paul Bunyan’s Blue Ox, Babe? It was “a beast so large that it took two men to see across one of his tracks.” That’s the take of Will H. Dilg, The DeKalb Daily Chronicle, 1925.
It isn’t merely that the writer wants the reader to imagine an ox that is especially large, but that it's ridiculously large.
Another writer, James MacGillivray, in 1906 tells us, between Babe’s horns, it measured "forty-two ax-handles and a plug of tobacco" (Oscoda Press). Using the unorthodox measuring tools makes sense because we're talking about lumberjacks, but adding the plug of tobacco just takes it another level. Let's not forget that the ox happens to be blue.
Paul Bunyan himself was so large that he used a Douglas Fir tree as a comb. Not just any fir tree. A Douglas fir tree.
A Little Dab'll Do Ya!
Do you remember the 1953 commercial for Brylcreem?
Brylcreem, a little dab'll do ya,
Brylcreem, you'll look so debonair.
Brylcreem, the gals'll all pursue ya;
They'll love to run their fingers through your hair!
You didn't a lot. You need it just enough to get the job done, and all the gals apparently would come running. The commercial naturally didn't tell you what would happen if you used a big glop of it.
It's the same thing with hyperboles.
Don't overdo it. You might find yourself laughing at your own work, but it's easy to exhaust the reader. You've got to ground your story with otherwise believable characters and contexts. If everything is hyperbole, then nothing is normal. If nothing is normal, hyperbole becomes normal. That's not good writing.
Think about your colorful characters and the things they say. Add a dash of hyperbole. Maybe two or three, maybe more depending on how long the story is.
Two Sentence Story Prompt
Here’s a quick prompt to push you forward, hyperbolically speaking.
The boy carried a stack of books so tall that it scraped the very clouds and made the moon jealous. He walked for a billion years just to find a single quiet spot where the silence was louder than a heavy metal concert.
A Not Funny Joke
Q: Why did the writer cross the road?
A: She was in the middle of a brutal essay revision, so she crossed the street to reorganize her spice rack, volunteer at the local animal shelter, and research the entire history of the 1904 World’s Fair.