I’ve begun a romance with metaphor. I hope my husband won’t mind.
At first glance, dear reader, many of you may cringe and have twitchy flashbacks to high school English classes, where tweedy teachers blathered on about elusive terms like irony, themes, imagery, and my beloved metaphor. You may have struggled to identify what the color red meant in The Scarlet Letter or who were the real savages in The Heart of Darkness (now I’m having flashbacks – not the good kind). And metaphors are tricky (as I found out while writing this). There are live and dead metaphors, dreaded mixed metaphors, and metaphors as symbols; the list goes on and only gets more confusing. I admit, as I started writing this I panicked my definitions were confused. I don’t want to be the blogger that writes prolifically about a literary device but gets it all wrong, and now the proof floats in the cloud forever (hey look, a metaphor).
Elyse Sommer, author of the Metaphors Dictionary, says that: “metaphor compares two unlike objects or ideas and illuminates the similarities between them.” In other words, it uses one thing to explain another thing, making the first thing easier to understand. Examples of some commonly used metaphors are “life is a highway,” “love is a rose,” and “time is money.”
What started my flirtation with metaphor is how these simple phrases convey so much more meaning than their brevity implies. A sweet smelling rose has soft, lush petals begging to be touched and admired. But if you handle it carelessly, sharp thorns will hurt you and it will quickly wither. And no matter how carefully you tend the rose, it will inevitably die (isn’t that a happy thought). While not a perfect metaphor for every love, you can see how they share many qualities.
In my book, I’m working with many different metaphors; small and large. Wait, that’s not quite right. I want to work with many different metaphors. I see endless places where I can use metaphor to bring a scene to life, make a character’s experiences more real, or even make you smell the coconut cake baking in the fictional oven. I don’t want to sprinkle them in randomly (hey – another metaphor), without plan or purpose. In other words, I don’t want metaphors for the sake of metaphors.
Lately, I find my mind wandering while driving or cooking, thinking about my metaphors, rolling around in the possibilities. My heart goes flip-flop when I write a decent one. Then I get a little giddy the more time I spend with it. But at this stage in my writing, I’m still plodding along with my first draft (yep – here’s another metaphor). Any metaphors appearing in the text resulted from random fits of inspiration, probably due to my coffee-soaked brain (whoa – I’m on a roll now). But good metaphors, the kind that make you re-read a sentence to savor all the nuances, require craft and intention.
So, dear reader, how do I get there? I’ll start with a plan. Given my meteorological title (I mention the title in the blog “What’s In a Name”); weather related metaphors seem a good place to start. I’ve been toying with one all day. The cottonwoods in my yard have started their annual seed release, filling the air with floating puffs. Something like, “it’s a summer flurry in slow motion” captures the image. It’s not perfect, but you get the drift (ha – get it).
So, dear reader, metaphor and I have date. We’ll get to know each other, find common interests, maybe stay up to watch the sun rise. Then we’ll see where the romance takes us…
June 5 Word Count = 28,677
