How can you use metaphors and similes to improve your writing?

In my experience as tutor and teacher, students can improve their writing rapidly by seeing how good writers work and then applying the same techniques themselves.

This current series of posts is about learning from that great master of writing, Charles Dickens.  The last post focused on an extract from his novel Hard Times, which you can read here.  Today’s post is about metaphors and similes.

Here is the passage again, and I’ve highlighted the metaphors and similes that he uses.

"Coketown was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage.  It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled.  It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. "

How could you use metaphors and similes in your own descriptive writing?

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