Show notes
When I was a child just beginning to speak, my parents drove late into the evening to the rural property they bought. As they drove up the gravel driveway, the sky spread out above us with stars glittering like a million diamonds spread out on a jeweler’s vast black velvet display.
Across the fields, a million lightning bugs hovered in the tall grass, their gleaming bodies flickering on and off.
I pointed at the sky. “’Tars!”
Then I pointed at the field. “Baby ’tars!”
Perhaps I was destined to become a poet from early on, but my confidence in landing on that perfect metaphor virtually disappeared over the years.
As a young adult, when I was writing books and blog posts, I rarely integrated metaphors into my writing, and it showed. My work was straightforward. Plainspoken.
While there’s nothing wrong with clear writing—in fact, that’s the foundation of nonfiction according to Ayn Rand (clarity first, then jazziness, she says1)—it lacked punch and pizzazz. My writing didn’t lift off the page and sink into the imagination or heart of the reader. It lacked that magical moment where an idea or image clicks and sticks with the reader.
Mastering Metaphors to Produce Great Writing
And I knew mastering metaphors was essential to great writing. I did write poetry in college, admiring lines like Emily Dickinson’s:
“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –2
Shakespeare’s:
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;3
And Wordsworth’s: “I wandered lonely as a cloud.”4
Robert Frost said, in an interview in The Atlantic, “If you remember only one thing I’ve said, remember that an idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor. If you have never made a good metaphor, then you don’t know what it’s all about.”5
Practicing Metaphor: Create Clunky Metaphors to Land on Magical Metaphors
I resolved to make a good metaphor. I practiced.
My early efforts were hardly as magical as the child connecting stars to lightning bugs. Instead, they were more like a child pointing to a horse and awkwardly pronouncing, “Dog!”
My metaphor practice felt clunkily childish instead of enchantingly childlike, but I had to make clunky comparisons to train my brain to find the oddly ideal ones that would surprise readers.
In a Paris Review interview, William Gass said:
I love metaphor the way some people love junk food. I think metaphorically, feel metaphorically, see metaphorically. And if anything in writing comes easily, comes unbidded, often unwanted, it is metaphor. Like follows as as night the day. Now most of these metaphors are bad and have to be thrown away. Who saves used Kleenex?6
The process of making metaphors and practicing at it will result in some stinkers. The bad ones, like used Kleenex, need not find their way into your work. Toss ’em. That’s what I’ve done.
Most of my comparisons fall flat, but I’ve found it’s worth experimenting with mediocre metaphors in hopes of landing on ideal metaphors because when we nail it—when we find the language that connects—the reader remembers, relates, reads on, and possibly repeats what we say.
I kept writing dumb metaphors until I found better, more creative, comparisons.
Poets, like Gass said, “think metaphorically, feel metaphorically, see metaphorically.” We don’t have to be poets to play with metaphor, but we can follow their lead, studying their technique, admiring the rhythm of how they see and put it into words, like they’re fly fishing, casting their line, the rod in motion, repeating the flow until the rod bends, line taut.
Our first time casting, we may end up with our lines tangled in the weeds lining the stream, but we’re out there, learning the process, finding the flow. It’ll come, in time, with practice.
Collecting Magical Metaphors
A smarter idea than bumbling around on our own would be to collect samples of metaphors that stick. I should have started earlier, to learn from mentor texts, from authors who know how to wield their pen like a wand to create metaphor magic.
In the first chapter of The Writing Life, Annie Dillard tries on a stream of writing-related metaphors: “When you write,” she says, “you lay out a line of words. The line of words is…”
- a miner’s pick
- a woodcarver’s gouge
- a surgeon’s probe7
- a hammer8
- a fiber optic, flexible as wire…you probe with it, delicate as a worm9
Was she laying out her lines of words searching for the right comparison? Or is our line of words any one of those—or all of those—at any given moment?
She looked at the line of words from so many angles, creating so many ways to think about our writing.
Metaphor Is a Bridge
Defined, a metaphor is a figure of speech where a word or phrase is applied to an object or action that it doesn’t literally denote, suggesting a comparison. Ideally, the comparison conveys deeper meaning and creates vivid imagery.
Similes are similar, using “like” or “as” to make comparisons. Metaphors, however, assert that something is something else. For instance, “time is a thief” suggests that time steals moments from our lives, giving us a deeper understanding of its fleeting nature.
In this way, metaphors are a bridge, providing an instant connection between two disparate places offering deeper insight to the reader who crosses over from one to the other.
When I was at the Spring 2024 Festival of Faith & Writing, Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See and Cloud Cuckoo Land, delivered the final keynote. In it, he spotlighted the power of metaphor to bring ideas, scenes, and images to life. He reinforced this bridge metaphor by pointing to its etymology.
“The etymology of ‘metaphor’ is ‘meta’ (across) and ‘pherein’ (bearing/conveying/carrying over)…A metaphor arrives and carries you across to the other side.”10
Metaphors Help Us See, Help Us Feel
Metaphors carry us from one way of seeing the world to a new way of seeing the world. They have the power to transform our perception of the ordinary, revealing hidden layers of meaning and emotion.
To help us see metaphors building their bizarre bridges, Doerr drew first from Virginia Woolf’s short story “The New Dress.”
In “The New Dress,” Woolf delves into the psyche of her protagonist, Mabel, who’s been invited to tea:
We are all like flies trying to crawl over the edge of the saucer, Mabel thought, and repeated the phrase as if she were crossing herself, as if she were trying to find some spell to annul this pain, to make this agony endurable.11
Mabel repeated that phrase of this idea of flies crawling over this saucer, and Doerr did, too, repeating the key image, nearly incredulous that this specific, vivid, odd metaphor works:
Ladies at a tea party are like flies? Flies trapped in a saucer, trying to crawl over the edge?
I can’t remember all the details Doerr covered in his wild, fast-paced message, but I managed to preserve this in my notes: “She’s trapped in the imagery. She’s wrapped round and round in the social and economic class.”12
This is the power of metaphors in literature—they can turn abstract emotions into concrete images, making the reader feel the character’s experience, enter it, and grasp it instantly as they cross the bridge from one idea to another: women at a tea party, like flies trying to crawl over the edge of a saucer.
Clichés Are Metaphors Gone Bad
Metaphors may be magic, but clichés are metaphors gone bad. Or, more simply, overused.
The first time someone said, “It’s a piece of cake!” to describe a difficult task that was easy to pull off, they likely charmed the listener to compare a task with a piece of cake.
Once upon a time, a gracious friend must have referred to an old situation that was forgiven and forgotten, and said, reassuringly, “That’s water under the bridge.” That first time, the other person must have visualized the hurt floating away and felt relief.
But over time, as these expressions were repeated countless times—maybe over a hundred years in some cases—they’ve lost their impact and originality. Once-vibrant metaphors have become yawners, failing to pack a punch because they’re overused.
That’s why editors are quick to flag clichés, pushing writers to find fresh comparisons that can surprise and engage readers.
Steer clear of clichés, and practice building better bridges. Craft evocative and emotionally resonant metaphors instead of stale clichés that whiz past unnoticed.
Ready to Tap the Magic of Metaphor?
Think about a character in your current project or a personal story if you write nonfiction.
What’s the main struggle or emotion?
Now, find an object, animal, or phenomenon that shares a deeper connection with that struggle or emotion.
Link the two to form the metaphor.
How can you weave the metaphor into your narrative to enrich the reader’s understanding?
Here’s an example:
The main struggle or emotion: A writer struggling with writer’s block.
Object, animal, or phenomenon: A locked door.
The metaphor: Writer’s block is a locked door.
Metaphor woven into the narrative: “Writer’s block is like standing at a locked door with no key, jiggling the handle, unable to access the creativity on the other side. Worse, if we manage to pick the lock, open the door, and peer inside, we discover the inspiration we expected on the other side still isn’t there…only an empty room.”
Technically speaking, that sample is in simile format (I used “like”), so a short r...
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