With Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach, you'll gain clarity and overcome hurdles to become a better writer, pursue publishing, and reach your writing goals. Ann provides practical tips and motivation for writers at all stages, keeping most episodes short and focused so writers only need a few minutes to collect ideas, inspiration, resources and recommendations they can apply right away to their work. For additional insight, she incorporates interviews from authors and publishing professionals like Allison Fallon, Ron Friedman, Shawn Smucker, Jennifer Dukes Lee, and Patrice Gopo. Tune in for solutions addressing anything from self-editing and goal-setting solutions to administrative and scheduling challenges. Subscribe for ongoing input for your writing life that's efficient and encouraging. More at annkroeker.com.
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With Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach, you'll gain clarity and overcome hurdles to become a better writer, pursue publishing, and reach your writing goals. Ann provides practical tips and motivation for writers at all stages, keeping most episodes short and focused so writers only need a few minutes to collect ideas, inspiration, resources and recommendations they can apply right away to their work. For additional insight, she incorporates interviews from authors and publishing professionals like Allison Fallon, Ron Friedman, Shawn Smucker, Jennifer Dukes Lee, and Patrice Gopo. Tune in for solutions addressing anything from self-editing and goal-setting solutions to administrative and scheduling challenges. Subscribe for ongoing input for your writing life that's efficient and encouraging. More at annkroeker.com.
When I was a child just beginning to speak, my parents drove late into the evening to the rural property they bought. As they drove up the gravel driveway, the sky spread out above us with stars glittering like a million diamonds spread out on a jeweler’s vast black velvet display.
Across the fields, a million lightning bugs hovered in the tall grass, their gleaming bodies flickering on and off.
I pointed at the sky. “’Tars!”
Then I pointed at the field. “Baby ’tars!”
Perhaps I was destined to become a poet from early on, but my confidence in landing on that perfect metaphor virtually disappeared over the years.
As a young adult, when I was writing books and blog posts, I rarely integrated metaphors into my writing, and it showed. My work was straightforward. Plainspoken.
While there’s nothing wrong with clear writing—in fact, that’s the foundation of nonfiction according to Ayn Rand (clarity first, then jazziness, she says1)—it lacked punch and pizzazz. My writing didn’t lift off the page and sink into the imagination or heart of the reader. It lacked that magical moment where an idea or image clicks and sticks with the reader.
Mastering Metaphors to Produce Great Writing
And I knew mastering metaphors was essential to great writing. I did write poetry in college, admiring lines like Emily Dickinson’s:
“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -2
Shakespeare’s:
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;3
And Wordsworth’s: “I wandered lonely as a cloud.”4
Robert Frost said, in an interview in The Atlantic, “If you remember only one thing I've said, remember that an idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor. If you have never made a good metaphor, then you don't know what it's all about.”5
Practicing Metaphor: Create Clunky Metaphors to Land on Magical Metaphors
I resolved to make a good metaphor. I practiced.
My early efforts were hardly as magical as the child connecting stars to lightning bugs. Instead, they were more like a child pointing to a horse and awkwardly pronouncing, "Dog!"
My metaphor practice felt clunkily childish instead of enchantingly childlike, but I had to make clunky comparisons to train my brain to find the oddly ideal ones that would surprise readers.
In a Paris Review interview, William Gass said:
I love metaphor the way some people love junk food. I think metaphorically, feel metaphorically, see metaphorically. And if anything in writing comes easily, comes unbidded, often unwanted, it is metaphor. Like follows as as night the day. Now most of these metaphors are bad and have to be thrown away. Who saves used Kleenex?6
The process of making metaphors and practicing at it will result in some stinkers. The bad ones, like used Kleenex, need not find their way into your work. Toss ’em. That’s what I’ve done.
Most of my comparisons fall flat, but I’ve found it's worth experimenting with mediocre metaphors in hopes of landing on ideal metaphors because when we nail it—when we find the language that connects—the reader remembers,
Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach
With Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach, you'll gain clarity and overcome hurdles to become a better writer, pursue publishing, and reach your writing goals. Ann provides practical tips and motivation for writers at all stages, keeping most episodes short and focused so writers only need a few minutes to collect ideas, inspiration, resources and recommendations they can apply right away to their work. For additional insight, she incorporates interviews from authors and publishing professionals like Allison Fallon, Ron Friedman, Shawn Smucker, Jennifer Dukes Lee, and Patrice Gopo. Tune in for solutions addressing anything from self-editing and goal-setting solutions to administrative and scheduling challenges. Subscribe for ongoing input for your writing life that's efficient and encouraging. More at annkroeker.com.
