Giving human qualities, emotions, or behaviors to non-human things like objects, animals, or abstract concepts.
Personification is when you treat something non-human as if it were a person. The wind howls. Fear grips you. The city never sleeps. You are giving human actions, feelings, or characteristics to things that do not literally possess them. It is one of the most natural figures of speech - we do it in everyday conversation without thinking - but in fiction, using it deliberately can transform flat description into something vivid and emotionally resonant.
Personification makes your writing feel alive. It turns static descriptions into dynamic ones and helps readers connect emotionally with things that are not human. When you write 'the house watched them leave,' that house is suddenly creepy and present in a way that 'the house was behind them' never achieves. It is one of the simplest tools to learn but one of the hardest to use with originality.
Death is the narrator, personified as a weary, compassionate figure haunted by the colors of the sky when collecting souls. It is one of the most memorable uses of personification in modern fiction.
Cisneros personifies the neighborhood itself, making houses, streets, and even trees feel like they have personalities and histories.
Dickinson personifies Death as a gentlemanly suitor who takes the speaker on a carriage ride, transforming something terrifying into something almost polite.
Phrases like 'time flies' or 'the sun smiled down' are so overused they have lost their power. Push past the first personification that comes to mind and find something fresher.
If you describe a storm as 'furious' in one paragraph and then treat it as a purely mechanical weather event in the next, the personification feels random. Commit to the characterization or drop it.
When every object in a scene has human feelings, the technique loses impact and the prose can feel overwrought. Choose your moments. One strong personification per scene is usually plenty.
Pick an abstract concept - loneliness, ambition, jealousy, or nostalgia - and write a 300-word passage where it is a character. Give it a physical appearance, mannerisms, and a way of speaking. Have it interact with a human character in a specific setting. Make the reader forget they are reading about an abstraction.