Making Metaphors
Lauren Kirshner, whose first novel will be published in Spring 2009, remarks:
I don’t know how I come up with metaphors. Anytime I’ve consciously “tried” to make a metaphor the result has been a little, uh, forced.
She gives examples of very bad metaphors, but it prompted me to think of some of the best ones:
Orwell’s Animal Farm uses animals as metaphors with great success. The pigs, animals which are usually regarded as inferior, are used to show the human lust for power and capacity for cruelty. While the horse, an animal which represents nobility for us, is seen reduced to the state of a commodity.
“(T)he greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor.” Aristotle in Poetics
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies, like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes. Robert Frost, Once by the Pacific
What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how
infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet,
to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—
nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so. Shakespeare’s Hamlet
A woman is a person who makes choices. A woman is a dreamer. A woman is a planner. A woman is a maker, and a molder. A woman is a person who makes choices. A woman builds bridges. A woman makes children and makes cars. A woman writes poetry and songs. A woman is a person who makes choices. Eleanor Holmes Norton
Death is a distant rumor to the young. Andrew A. Rooney
Do you have a favourite metaphor of your own, and, like Kirshner, do you rely on intuition for your metaphors, or simply wait for them to arrive?
Table of contents for Learning To Write
- Learning to Write I
- Learning to Write II
- Learning to Write III
- Learning to Write IV
- Learning to Write V
- Learning to Write VI
- Learning to Write VII
- Learning to Write VIII
- Learning to Write IX
- Learning to Write X
- Learning to Write XI
- Learning to Write XII
- Learning to Write XIII
- Learning to Write XIV
- Learning to Write XV
- Learning to Write XVI
- Learning to Write XVII
- Learning to Write XVIII
- Learning to Write XIX
- Learning to Write XX
- Learning to Write XXI
- Learning to Write XXII
- Learning to Write XXIII
- Learning to Write XXIV
- Learning to Write XXV
- Learning to Write XXVI
- Learning to Write XXVII
- Learning to Write XXVIII
- Learning to Write XXIX
- Learning to Write XXX
- Learning to Write XXXI
- Fictional Character
- How Many Plots Are There?
- Making Metaphors
- Four Walls and One Passion
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My advice to her is to read more poetry, especially a poet like Dick Jones who manages to pile them one on top of another and gets away with it. I tend to work with extended metaphors. It depends what she’s looking for. And, of course, an absolute master of the metaphor is the writer William McIlvanney. I found a copy of ‘Strange Loyalties’ in a bookshop the last time I was out and someone had gone through it with a pencil underlining all the good bits. And there were a lot.
jb says: Proof, if it were needed, is amply provided by Dick Jones’ poem, Christmas Eve.
I grew up on a farm, lived in the mountains of Colorado for years, and taught the martial arts for a long time. The result is I see metaphors everywhere. They leap out at me all the time because I use them to connect with others. What better way to teach than to take a subject someone knows (ex. home construction) and turn it into a metaphor so they can understand more easily (”A karate stance is like the foundation of a building …”).
jb says: Thanks for that, SAS. A teacher is always on the way.
What a great blog.
I love it.
jb says: Thanks for that, Terry. I’m walking tall today.
(Gulp!) Thanks, boys. Walking tall here too now.
It seems like a Jungian synchronicity, but Jacob Russell, on his Barking Dog blog brings some quotations from Robert Musil’s novel, The Man Without Qualities, where Musil talks about figurative language. There are several insights in this piece and if you’re interested in the metaphor you should read the whole article, but this is the one that struck me: