Metaphors and Similes
I've been thinking about metaphors and similes today.
Writer Justine Larbalestier has been answering writing questions on her blog this month and one of the questions she answered several days ago was about finding "great similes to create good imagery." Normally, I like her humorous approach, but I felt she was so focused on clichéd or over-the-top similes, that she didn't address what I see as the real issue, which is how to discover those fresh similes and metaphors that can help your prose speak to your readers.
Then, this afternoon, I was reading a bit more of The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain
amd the current topic was metaphor. In the chapter, "Metaphor, the Inner Voice, and the Muse," Alice Flaherty points to research that suggests that we use metaphor far more often than we realize. In one study, researchers found that, on average, English speakers use three thousand original metaphors each week. She also discusses an attempt to catalog metaphors in an Internet database and states that "nearly everything is a metaphor."
Particularly fun to read, too, was her quotation of Samuel Parker, describing metaphors as: "meer products of Imagination, dress'd up (like Childrens babies) in a few spangled empty words. . . . Thus their wanton and luxurious fancies climbing up into the Bed of Reason, do not only defile it by unchaste and illegitimate Embraces, but instead of real conceptions and notices of Things, impregnate the mind with nothing by Ayerie and Subventaneous Phantasmes." (p. 225)
In a class I took, "Linguistics and the Study of Literature," we did analyses of some pretty prosaic passages taken from a variety of fiction and not-fiction sources and discovered that the use of metaphor is pervasive. If I recall the lesson correctly, our linguistics professor held an opinion very similar to Flaherty's, that it is extremely difficult to communicate effectively without the use of metaphor.
I have not deliberately used or avoided the use of metaphor in this evening's post (with the exception of the quoted passage), although they were, of course, on my mind, and I don't believe I've used any similes. It might be interesting to see how many metaphors you think I've used.
Poll Metaphors
ETA: I counted eight metaphors, using my fairly liberal interpretation of the term. It was fun to see the different ways we think about metaphor. Thank you for sharing your thoughts about this.
Writer Justine Larbalestier has been answering writing questions on her blog this month and one of the questions she answered several days ago was about finding "great similes to create good imagery." Normally, I like her humorous approach, but I felt she was so focused on clichéd or over-the-top similes, that she didn't address what I see as the real issue, which is how to discover those fresh similes and metaphors that can help your prose speak to your readers.
Then, this afternoon, I was reading a bit more of The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain
amd the current topic was metaphor. In the chapter, "Metaphor, the Inner Voice, and the Muse," Alice Flaherty points to research that suggests that we use metaphor far more often than we realize. In one study, researchers found that, on average, English speakers use three thousand original metaphors each week. She also discusses an attempt to catalog metaphors in an Internet database and states that "nearly everything is a metaphor."
Particularly fun to read, too, was her quotation of Samuel Parker, describing metaphors as: "meer products of Imagination, dress'd up (like Childrens babies) in a few spangled empty words. . . . Thus their wanton and luxurious fancies climbing up into the Bed of Reason, do not only defile it by unchaste and illegitimate Embraces, but instead of real conceptions and notices of Things, impregnate the mind with nothing by Ayerie and Subventaneous Phantasmes." (p. 225)
In a class I took, "Linguistics and the Study of Literature," we did analyses of some pretty prosaic passages taken from a variety of fiction and not-fiction sources and discovered that the use of metaphor is pervasive. If I recall the lesson correctly, our linguistics professor held an opinion very similar to Flaherty's, that it is extremely difficult to communicate effectively without the use of metaphor.
I have not deliberately used or avoided the use of metaphor in this evening's post (with the exception of the quoted passage), although they were, of course, on my mind, and I don't believe I've used any similes. It might be interesting to see how many metaphors you think I've used.
Poll Metaphors
ETA: I counted eight metaphors, using my fairly liberal interpretation of the term. It was fun to see the different ways we think about metaphor. Thank you for sharing your thoughts about this.