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John Baker's Blog

Reflections of a working writer and reader

Let's say you're writing the story from Della's point of view. You can say, "Della looked up into Rodney's adoring face," but you can't say, "Della raised her incredibly beautiful violet eyes to Rodney's adoring face." Why not? Because although Della may be aware she's incredibly beautiful and has violet eyes, that's not what Della sees when she looks up. That's what Rodney sees. And Della is the person whose mind you're in. Only Della's perceptions are perceptible. Rodney's aren't. And if Della really is thinking about the color of her own eyes, instead of how adorably adoring Rodney looks, you have to explain why: "She raised her eyes, knowing the effect their violet beauty would have on him." If this still seems mysterious, consider that the limited third person is very like the first person in some ways; and you know that when you write as "I" you can tell only what "I" see and know. - "I raised my incredibly beautiful violet eyes to Rodney's adoring face." I'm sure you see that you wouldn't write that. Ursula K. Le Guin

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

  1. Learning to Write I
  2. Learning to Write II
  3. Learning to Write III
  4. Learning to Write IV
  5. Learning to Write V
  6. Learning to Write VI
  7. Learning to Write VII
  8. Learning to Write VIII
  9. Learning to Write IX
  10. Learning to Write X
  11. Learning to Write XI
  12. Learning to Write XII
  13. Learning to Write XIII
  14. Learning to Write XIV
  15. Learning to Write XV
  16. Learning to Write XVI
  17. Learning to Write XVII
  18. Learning to Write XVIII
  19. Learning to Write XIX
  20. Learning to Write XX
  21. Learning to Write XXI
  22. Learning to Write XXII
  23. Learning to Write XXIII
  24. Learning to Write XXIV
  25. Learning to Write XXV
  26. Learning to Write XXVI
  27. Learning to Write XXVII
  28. Learning to Write XXVIII
  29. Learning to Write XXIX
  30. Learning to Write XXX
  31. Learning to Write XXXI
  32. Fictional Character
  33. How Many Plots Are There?
  34. Making Metaphors
  35. Four Walls and One Passion
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This was posted on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 at 8:59 am. You can follow any responses through the RSS 2.0 feed.

5 responses to “Making Metaphors”

  1. § Jim Murdoch on July 2nd, 2008 at 12:04 pm

    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.

  2. § SpaceAgeSage on July 2nd, 2008 at 3:52 pm

    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.

  3. § Terry Finley on July 3rd, 2008 at 3:36 am

    What a great blog.
    I love it.

    jb says: Thanks for that, Terry. I’m walking tall today.

  4. § Dick on July 3rd, 2008 at 10:54 pm

    (Gulp!) Thanks, boys. Walking tall here too now.

  5. § john baker on July 4th, 2008 at 3:33 pm

    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:

    These two basic strategies, the figurative and the unequivocal, have been distinguishable ever since the beginnings of humanity. Single-mindedness is the law of all waking thought and action, as much present in a compelling logical conclusion as in the mind of the blackmailer who enforces his will on his victim step by step, and it arises from the exigencies of life where only the single-minded control of circumstances can avert disaster. Metaphor, by contrast, is like the image that fuses several meanings in a dream; it is the gliding logic of the soul, corresponding to the way things relate to each other in the intuitions of art and religion. [...] No doubt what is called the higher humanism is only the effort to fuse together these two great halves of life, metaphor and truth, once they have been carefully distinguished from each other. But once one has distinguished everything in a metaphor that might be true from what is mere froth, one usually has gained a little truth, but at the cost of destroying the whole value of the metaphor. The extraction of the truth…has had the same effect of boiling down a liquid to thicken it, while the really vital juices and elements escape in a cloud of steam. It is often hard, nowadays, to avoid the impression that the concepts and rules of the moral life are only metaphors that have been boield to death, with the revolting greasy kitchen vapors of humanism billowing around the corpses.

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