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Craft and Draft: Metaphor Galore

April 15, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

If I put you in a dark room with a lone chair in the middle, made you close your eyes and just listen to random people speak, you could tell me a ton of information without much effort: the sex of the speaker, their rough level of education, the region they’re from, the mood they’re in, where they are in relation to you, and lots more.

Aside from touch, our voice is one of the only ways we can connect to another person; the sound waves of our speech bouncing and rebounding, pooling in their ears where they can physically process the meaning of the message. We connect a lot of emotions and meaning to a voice and revere its power through things like plays and songs.

Some voices are soft and gentle, like your mother waking you up for your first day of elementary school. Other voices are harsh and cruel; an angry drill instructor, an unscrupulous calculus teacher, a dictator with a tenuous grasp on his rule. And yet some are irreverent and silly, some spiked and drunken, some magical and lilting and full of poetic grace.

A writer’s voice is the same a spoken one; it is personality on the page, how you sound to your reader. When you write something, it’s like a text recording of your voice, packaged up on pages, sent direct-download to the media player in your reader’s brain.

The term, “voice,” gets throw around a lot: “you need to work on your voice,” or “your voice could be stronger here,” or “her voice is so clear and consistent in this piece!” But what is a writer’s voice? How can it be defined and caught and kept in a jar of formaldehyde for dissection and study?

An oversimplified answer is that your voice is a combination of your day-to-day personality, your diction, your attitude towards the subject (or tone), and most importantly, metaphor.

What, metaphor?

Yep, metaphor.

Metaphor Galore

We all know what a metaphor is, right? A comparison of one thing to another, tangentially disparate thing in an attempt to create an image or elicit an emotion or make someone laugh. They use imagery and creative language to cause your reader to create a visual comparison in their mind like an LCD monitor with a slide show of your story. Did you picture a TV in someone’s head just now?

Just in case you’re not familiar with metaphor, here’s one: “He wrote with the abandon of a drunk sea captain who knew that this night, in this storm, the sea would finally drag him home.”

Yay, metaphor: making writing and language more than just communication since 600 AD.

But what makes metaphor special, other than it’s ability to conjure images better than Dumbledore, Gandalf, Merlin, and uh…Willow?… combined?

Metaphor is Unique to You

I’m going to give you a present. It’s a big brown burlap bag full of potential metaphors. All yours. For free. You can thank me later.

When you go to create an image via metaphor, you’re bringing all of your collective knowledge about life with it. You have forged connections between ideas in your brain that are as unique as your fingerprint or the first dainty flake of an incoming blizzard. When you compose a metaphor – a good, strong, bold metaphor – there is a very good chance that nothing like it exists anywhere else in the written world. It sounds crazy, but that’s the power of the sprawling, near-infinite universe of English.

Do you ever notice yourself, mid-story or essay, making very thematically similar comparisons? I for one am guilty of writing a lot of metaphors about battle, chivalry, and ancient lore. That’s because those are the things I like, the things I’ve exposed myself to over years and years of reading and writing and pop culture. My metaphors are Tolkien and George R. R. Martin and Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. They are SyFy channel and Star Wars and a huge unsorted bin of Lego bricks.

Food writers may make a lot of cooking and eating metaphors, relying on smell and taste to create their imagery. Sport writers may use a lot of athletic and physical terminology. How you create a comparison is going to be built, nay forged, from what you do in life and what has slowly seeped into the crevices of your brain, consciously and subconsciously.

And this is the greatest thing ever for you as a writer. It gives you license to embrace all that weird, counter-culture stuff you’ve been so greedily imbibing, an absolutely acceptable (probably even encouraged) environment to write quite literally, “what you know.”

The more unique the connections you’ve made between ideas, the more vivid and confident your imagery, the more your voice will boom out from the flat ink of the page, invade your reader’s head and keep them thinking about your work long after they’ve closed the book.

So go, be free, play word and idea association with yourself like a raving vagrant. Take chances are trust in your own skill that the images you create will work. If they don’t, if your imagination ran a bit too wild-pony-on-the-loose, don’t worry. You can always fix them in edit.

Better to have written a wild, never-before read dream than a boring, expected plunker.

"A great metaphor is like a white squirrel: rare, worth crawling through your yard with a zoom lens to see." -Oliver Gray (copyright right now)

“A great metaphor is like a white squirrel: rare, and worth crawling through your yard with a zoom lens to see.” -Oliver Gray (copyright right now)

Craft and Draft: Idea-Logical

December 19, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

I start everyday with a shower. While I spin around ritualistically in the hot water, ideas start to froth forth from my brain like the bubbles of my Garnier Fructis. I have some of my best ideas as I stand, half awake, doing my daily preening, and should probably invent some sort of waterproof notepad so that I can write while I cleanse.

If I take a cross-section of all my writer friends and boil it down to its atomic basics, there seem to be two quite bipartisan groups when it comes to ideas: those who have more ideas than they know what to do with and those who struggle to come up with any ideas at all.

As a sufferer from clinical Overimaginatitus, I fit into the prior category. I am constantly coming up with ideas, all day, most of which are so bizarre and so specific to my own preconceived mental conditions that they are little more than wisps of inanity that disappear just as quickly as they came. My challenge is sifting through the hoard of ideas my imagination creates, finding the ones that have potential and moving the rest to the recycling bin of my brain.

But I know there are other people who either don’t don’t experience a deluge of so many ideas, or struggle to convince themselves than an idea is good. This is equally challenging and it requires a lot of personal discipline to run with and commit to any one topic.

How does one figure out which ideas are worth the rare delicious spice that is our writing time? How can we possibly know, in the microcosm of the world that is our own creativity, that one specific idea will lead to an engaging finished product?

We don’t. Probably can’t. But there are somethings we can do to come up with good ideas, and more importantly, make sure we execute them in a way that shows other people how good the idea is.

1. Know Thyself

I get ideas in the shower because my mind is quiet. I am able to complete the necessary bathing activities without much critical thinking, leaving my brain completely open and available. I let my conscious mind disappear into the white noise of the falling water, the heat on my skin, the smell of the various soaps that litter our shower stall.

From this mental carte blanche, the ideas begin to coagulate.

Other activities promote this idea generating state: mowing the lawn, running, watching SyFy Originals movies. I know that these banalities can serve dual purposes in my life, and I’ve started to actively notice when more ideas are flowing than usual.

There are two generally accepted ways to kick start this sort of hyper-creative state of mind: overstimulation and sensory deprivation.

My showers are an example of sensory deprivation; a situation and environment when I have almost nothing to think about, and can let my left brain magically guide my muscles while my right brain inhales the intoxicating mists of whatever my brain is smoking. Many classic forms of divination (like scrying and gazing into a crystal ball) work off of the concept of sensory deprivation.

Overstimulation is the exact opposite. Some people can find amazing value in exposing themselves to an extreme influx of sounds and sights and smells. The idea is that your senses get so overwhelmed trying to process everything that your left brain takes over in an attempt to save your brain from imploding. Some people have their best ideas when they are about-to-collapse busy, chasing kids, finishing up a big project at work. This is a classic example of overstimulation.

The next time you’re suddenly awash with great ideas that you can’t seem to silence, think about how you got there. If you can figure out what situation is the most conducive to you creative compelling things, you can watch for similar situations going forward and start to learn when you brain is at its most active.

2. Organize and Record

I used to beat myself up over losing ideas. I’d have something (I thought was) brilliant to use on the blog or for a longer form piece, only to come up with ash and fragments of ideas when trying to recall it later.

In defiance, I started writing everything down. Every little idea, phrase, quote, doodle, word, lyric that inspired me. It quickly became an inky chaos where ideas entered, but never exited. I could never find the original thought, and when looking back over my own scribbles, often thought that I needed serious psychological help.

So I got technical. We all have access to a computer (unless you’re reading this on some sort of magical rock). We all have access to the organizational tools a computer provides.

Make a spreadsheet. Start writing your ideas down, in order, with dates of when you came up with them. It doesn’t have to be fancy, just something with enough function to keep things organized. Once you get used to using it, you can get fancy: color coding, tabs for levels of interest, comments with tangential ideas, even crazy things like who and where you pitched said idea to.

Not organizing your ideas is like asking for them to disappear into the cosmic background radiation. It’s like a carpenter ordering a bunch of wood to build a really nice desk and having the delivery company just dump it in a huge pile outside his workshop. He’s going to be able to focus on what is much more important – the craft and artistry of building that awesome roll-top desk I’ve always wanted – instead of sitting there, trying to organize the wood into piles, just to find the right piece.

3. Open your mouth

You are a person (unless you are some sort of magical rock). You live, eat, dance, fight, and work with other people. Find some people who are similar to you temperamentally and creatively. When you have an idea, share it.

Don’t sit and ramble about some weird-ass dream you had where you went to an underwater school and had to swim between classes because a giant sea monster with a light red on his head tries to eat all the student as they swim.

Do sit and ramble about the story you might want to write about some kids who go to an underwater school and their potential hilarious perils. Ask questions, listen to reactions to your plans, internalize what you can, and discard what you don’t want.

When you talk about an idea, you can get other perspectives on it; other evaluations of its potential word-worth, and most importantly, you can hear it again outside of the filtered, unreliable confines of your own mind. The greatest idea you ever had (like for reals it was so good, NY Times bestseller for sure) might sound totally cliched and moronic when you actually try to explain it to someone.

Talking about ideas can either make them into something worth writing, or remind you why not everything that comes out of your brain is neuron-forged gold.

4. Set the oven to 375, cook until golden-brown

I think most ideas have potential. They are seeds of promise, just waiting for the fertile soil of a blank Word document and the right conditions to grow.

I also think too many writers, armed with Miracle-Gro laced with impatience, try to force their seeds to sprout too quickly.

Good ideas take time to mature. Go check out the amount of research time it takes for someone to get enough background and context to finish a book. The basic unit of measurement here is years. Ideas for short pieces will obviously have less fermentation time, but you should still appreciate that it may take a while for you to even really know what you want to write about, nevermind what the actual story is about.

Don’t rush, guys. Seriously. It’s not cool. Your ideas deserve their childhood. You don’t want to be the reason your ideas need to go to therapy in their twenties to talk about their loss of innocence.

Take your time, let your ideas grow naturally. I promise they’ll be better for it.

"The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones. " -John Maynard Keynes

“Words are but the signs of ideas.” -Samuel Johnson

Flowing with the Go

September 18, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

I only wear one piece of jewelry; a sterling silver pendant in the shape of a backwards number “1.”

It’s not a backwards number “1” though, because that would just be silly. I’m also not egoistical enough to wear the “top place” symbol all day and the individual digit itself has no special meaning in my life.

The necklace is actually a tiny version of the laguz rune; a Norse character of the Elder Futhark that roughly translates to “water.” I wear it to remind myself of the impermanence, flexibility, and tenacious qualities the ubiquitous liquid. Not only does it instantly reshape itself to fit any container, it can be difficult to contain to begin with. It will seep and soak and pour itself into any gap, only stopping when it has reached an obstacle that is, quite literally, impermeable. Humans have been trying to master and control water since Neandertals mastered the doggy-paddle, with relatively little success.

I try to apply these philosophical abstracts to my personal life. If I can flow and adapt like water, nothing but the most dense situations can contain me, and none but the driest and least pore-laden of of people can hold me back. After some practice, it makes the worst events seem like brief obstacles in the river of your life. You’re never stuck dwelling on or seething over something, as you’ve floated on long since.

These are ideas that I also apply to my craft; a set of principles that has helped me make progress as I wind my little writing stream closer and closer to the ocean of published professionalism.

When I write, I do my best to let my mind flow. I move with my ideas, letting them carve huge meandering curves into my story, sometimes resulting in oxbow lakes of sub-plots and minor characters as the words loop back onto themselves. I let my creativity spill from the goblet of my brain, watching closely to see where the droplets fall, seeing what pools where, what soaks into what, and if any streams run off in a direction previously unexplored.

It’s an incredibly free-form style, but hey, that’s water.

It reminds me of another concept I use when I write, the appropriately named phenomenon of flow. First articulated by Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (yea, I can’t pronounce that either), flow is the idea that when you satisfy a specific set of psychological criteria, your mind enters a phase where you are intensely focused on your art, time passes incredibly quickly without you noticing, and you are blissfully engaged at peak efficiency.

Flow can happen to anyone, anywhere, but is often tied to task-oriented activities like gaming, painting, sculpting, sewing, playing instruments, golf, martial arts, meditation – and you guessed it – writing. It aids in unleashing imagination lightning bolts and satisfying your primal urges to create. It also helps ward off depression and increase overall life satisfaction, if case studies are to be believed.

So the next time you’re slamming your head against your keyboard because the ideas just won’t come, or when they do come they suck, stop.

Think.

Are you a rock? Too sedentary, unwilling to move or change much, staying in the same place you’ve been for a very long time?

Or are you a gust of wind? Fleeting to a fault, not taking the time for ideas to mature, moving on to topic after topic but never really settling on anything for more than a moment?

Maybe you’re a dancing flame? Passionate but uncontrollable, letting your desires and emotions guide you, second guessing yourself, burning your words to ash in a fit of rage or destruction?

Maybe you should be more like water. Flow a little, it’s good for you.

(As I was walking to work, past the bridge, I noticed this, carved perfectly into the concrete as if it were as natural as the leaves on an oak tree.)

Along the way to close my eyes,
I lost where I was going,
the more it will spin,
the more that I try,
to stop my mind flowing away, away.