Creative writing - Mike Sanders 2014

Comparing with metaphors
Energetic figures of speech
Speech, voice, and point of view

“Joshua’s vocabulary was so bad … I mean it really was … I don’t know, like, you know, whatever.”

Why use metaphors? Because, just like the other figures of speech, they enliven ordinary language. We get so accustomed to using the same words and phrases over and over, in the same ways, we sometimes forget what they really mean. Creative writers have the power to make the ordinary strange (or funny, or different) and make the strange (or funny, or different) ordinary, making life, and reading, interesting again.

DEFINITION

A metaphor is a comparison between two things, based on resemblance or similarity, without using the words like or as.

Metaphors are generous to readers (and listeners); they encourage interpretation. When readers encounter a phrase or word that cannot be interpreted literally, they have to think—or rather, they’re given the pleasure of interpretation. If you write “I am frustrated” or “The air was cold,” you give your readers nothing to do. They’ll think to themselves, So what? On the other hand, if you write, “My ambition was Hiroshima, after the bombing,” your readers can think about and choose from many possible meanings.

Metaphors also are more efficient and economical than ordinary language; they afford maximum meaning with a minimum of words. By writing “My job is a prison,” you suggest to your readers that you feel like you’re locked in solitary confinement, fed lousy food, deprived of all of life’s great pleasures, made to endure a poorly lit and cramped work area—and a hundred other things, that, if you tried to say them all, would probably take several pages.

Like the other figures of speech, metaphors can be fun to experiment and play with. Here are some examples to get you thinking of your own:

The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.

It hurt, the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.

It will take a big tractor to plow the fertile fields of Karen’s mind.

Wendy’s face was a perfect oval as though two sides of a circle had been violently compressed by a ThighMaster.

Even in his golden years, Granddaddy David had a steel-trap mind, only one that had been left outside too long, so it had rusted shut.

WRITING PROMPT

Think of your current occupation or a hobby or pastime you know extremely well. Using your specialized knowledge, write as many metaphors as you can. Then show them to a trusted friend, taking note of their favorites and reasons for liking them.

Humorous though these examples may seem, they attest to the fact that there are many gaps in language. When a child looks at the sky and sees a star but doesn’t know the word star, she might say something like, “Mommy, look at the lamp in the sky!” Similarly, when computer software developers created boxes on the screen as a user interface, they needed a new language; the result was Windows.

In your poems, you’ll often be trying to write about subjects and feelings so complex, you have no choice but to employ metaphors. They’re often the best devices for attempting to say what initially might seem unsayable.

In his Poetics, Aristotle asserted that metaphors actually are indicators of genius in a person. They are “a sign of genius,” he explained, “since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.” Whether you agree with this or not, it’s true enough that writers should take the requisite time to practice creative ways of using metaphors. Doing so might not make you a genius, but it will certainly improve the documents you pen—perhaps even to the point readers will believe they must have been written by a genius.