How To Craft Enduring Metaphors
I know of few literary devices more delightful than metaphors, those artful comparisons between two otherwise unrelated things. Metaphors capture both halves of Horace’s dictum that literature ought to instruct and delight.
The grammarian might distinguish between metaphors and similes, but I don’t much care whether figurative language includes “like” or “as.” The intent is the same. Both forms are driven by a teacherly impulse even when used with a light touch. Mere descriptions of falling in love, watching a sunset over the Pacific, or experiencing a sudden flash of insight aren’t enough, so we grope beyond the limits of language to explain what we mean. Hence the many comparisons between madness and love (I’m crazy about you, baby), the common feeling that the sky ignites before nightfall (A bed of coals stretched across the horizon), and the many cartoons depicting epiphanies as lightning bolts or light bulbs.
Metaphor is an attempt to explain something indirectly, inviting the reader to complete the connection. We all do it in conversation, falling back on clichés that once were fantastic metaphors. I felt like a fish out of water is a wonderful explanation of how it feels to be an outsider, not merely displaced from a natural habitat, but desperate, gasping for air. The comparison loses its magic with predictability, so the writer keeps trying to reassemble the raw materials for a fresh epiphany.
For more on the affinities between original metaphors and epiphanies, see this essay from last spring.
If creating a mountaintop moment for your reader feels like a stretch, try this simple exercise, which I learned from Taylor Mali.
Pick a toy or object that you cared deeply about as a child. Maybe it was a teddy bear or a bicycle.
Describe it in as much depth as you can, pushing beyond visuals to include touch, smell, sound, and (if applicable) taste.
Now begin a poem or essay titled, “My Childhood Was A _____,” and fill in the blank with that object. How do you see your childhood differently if you turn the toy into a metaphor, seeing yourself or your past through all of the qualities that endeared that object to you?
It’s possible to adapt the exercise to any ordinary thing — first understanding it well, then expanding that precise grasp of its unique qualities to a personal experience, feeling, or thought. If your writing is more methodical than mystical, it’s possible to craft excellent metaphors this way, thinking deeply about the logic and integrity of the comparisons. Is the figurative connection too loose? Are there too many distracting exceptions to the comparison? Or does it offer the reader a clean flash of understanding, with no dust motes floating in between?
I adapted that last metaphor from Steve Cox and Ted Kooser, from their book Writing Brave and Free: “The power of metaphor may come from…the writer’s use of controls, so that the dazzling spark that arcs from one side of the comparison to the other is a clean flash, not dimmed by extraneous matter floating in between. A writer’s goal is to light up the sky.”
Here are a few more metaphors from recent Substack essays. What makes them memorable to you?
, from “Unwired” in :, from “Last Dance,” in :I believe the soul – by which I mean our essence, the unhackable watermark that separates you from me - is incubated in silence, in the unmediated reaches of consciousness, in the free play of the imagination.
We’re awkward in this dance, her head upon my shoulder as she braces to make the move go easy. I feel the fear—that she will drop me—her warm breath against my neck. I move my right hand to her back to tell her, It will be all right.
This piece is best read in full, since the title is an extended metaphor, comparing the intimacy of caring for an aging parent with the intimacy of a dance.
, from “Population v. Electricity,” in :Neil Postman…has recently reshaped the way I think about electricity, and technology, in general. His argument is that electricity is best thought of as having an intelligence of its own, and once a technology like electricity achieves monopolistic control over communications, as it has, then society dedicates itself, essentially, to exploring the properties of electricity. This is, in a sense, the best way to understand what we’re looking at when we sit in a crowded train and see every single person hunched over their phone — what they are doing isn’t so much attending to whatever function the phone is providing that connects to their own life, they are just literally fascinated by the fact of electricity itself, and the way that electricity is playing out in the latest manifestation of whatever app they are tapping on and video they are scrolling through.
In fact, Postman sees every technology as “a metaphor waiting to unfold.” The Industrial Revolution gave us many such metaphors (the factory, the engine, the computer). Before that, farming technologies were spiritual metaphors. The everyday wants to open up into that symbolic realm, or perhaps this is just part of the magic of human consciousness, that we need to see the world in this way to comprehend it, to strike closer to its mysteries.
In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard recalls hiding pennies as a child, then drawing chalk arrows toward the crack in the sidewalk where she’d nested the treasure. She never stuck around to watch, but the thought of a stranger happening upon this unexpected gift gave her a thrill.
It’s this childlike joy in simple gifts that Dillard rekindles in her pilgrimage at Tinker Creek:
The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But — and this is the point — who gets excited by a mere penny? If you follow one arrow, if you crouch motionless on a bank to watch a tremulous ripple thrill on the water and are rewarded by the sight of a muskrat kit paddling from its den, will you count that sight a chip of copper only, and go your rueful way? It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get.
I’m sure this article has already been written, but there are strong echoes in Dillard’s memoir of Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus. Carlyle makes a similar point to Dillard’s about mindset determining happiness. Even the notion of luck or good fortune is relative to how we interpret our lives, how we see.
Fancy that thou deservest to be hanged (as is most likely), thou wilt feel it happiness to be only shot: fancy that thou deservest to be hanged in a hair-halter, it will be a luxury to die in hemp. So true is it, what I then say, that the Fraction of Life can be increased in value not so much by increasing your Numerator as by lessening your Denominator. Nay, unless my Algebra deceive me, Unity itself divided by Zero will give Infinity. Make thy claim of wages a zero, then; thou hast the world under thy feet.
I’d have to browse Dillard’s notes and journals for proof that she meant to recycle Carlyle’s idea, but I include the two passages side by side to suggest a third way of crafting enduring metaphors, perhaps the most tried and true method of all: not to plagiarize another writer, exactly, but to adapt a metaphor that you discover while reading, perhaps softening and simplifying it in the way that Dillard does, transforming Carlyle’s economic fractions into the more lyrical metaphor of pennies hiding everywhere in plain sight, strewn by a generous hand.
If metaphors do not visit you in the form of epiphanies, and if prompts feel lifeless in your writing practice, then the oldest solution is still the best: make more time to read. Some writers just borrow or steal, but it’s possible to think of Dillard’s method of making Carlyle’s metaphor her own as akin to covering another artist’s song.
Kevin Welch wrote the song “Millionaire” in 2002. The song is built around an extended metaphor that is lovely in its own right. But listen to how Solomon Burke and Chris Stapleton improve on the original. Their method can also be yours as a writer: read and listen widely, gather all those metaphors into your imagination, and see how they sound when you translate them into your own life’s witness.
What are some of your favorite metaphors in literature or music?
Have long loved Annie Dillard!
Thanks for the childhood favorite toy exercise. Immediately I remembered the stuffed donkey that my mother threw away when I wasn’t looking… definitely something for me to unpack!
This post has been SAVED for reference. So much here from the metaphors (which are going in my commonplace book!) to the writing prompt (definitely going to riff on my childhood blankie that I softed to near disintegration). My favorite metaphors come from Rush... There are so many!
I wrote a poem once about missing a magnolia tree that is blooming in the backyard of a home that was once mine, and used the blooming crimson watercolor on my sketchbook as a metaphor for the wound I carry of having to leave that home behind. Sharing the short poem here with link to the watercolor: https://open.substack.com/pub/emilykaminsky/p/sweet-jane-magnolia
So I dress
My wound with crimson blooms
Atop the cream of mother’s milk
To form a cup to hold
Lost dreams once more.
In fascimile, she appears
Releasing my desire to resurrect
The ephemeral past.
Joy from my page springs,
Palpable optimism
So close I taste it.