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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: Imagine all the Imagery

April 8, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

In his post-Beatles solo adventure, John Lennon wanted us to imagine, to cast our brains out across the ethereal philosophical planes, to conceptualize a world with no hate or fear or hunger. His aims were admirable. He just wanted us to have some perspective.

But ultimately, aside of the haunting C-major-to-F Steinway piano riff, it wasn’t very effective at getting anyone to imagine anything concrete.

At least not in terms of writing.

It’s odd, because Lennon wants us to “imagine,” or to caveman it down a bit, “think of pretty pictures.” The word imagine (and imagination) contains the word “image” suggesting that to imagine something is to conjure up a relevant image in your mind. What words does he use to tell us how to create the images he’s trying to evoke?

“Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people sharing all the world”

Nice sentiment, but there is nothing in those lyrics for me to picture. How do I picture greed? Maybe a fat king in front of a huge feast, grease from the chicken he’s eating dripping into his brown beard while his people, ribs poking through grey flesh, starve in the streets? Maybe a robber-baron circa 1880 sitting in his plantation-style mansion feeding crisp twenty dollar bills to his perfectly bred English mastiffs?

Greed (and need and hunger and possessions, and the whole song) is an abstract. Lennon wanted us to imagine all these things as he was imagining them, but without the specifics, I’m left having to do all the mental work myself and even worse, may be picturing something completely different than (or unrelated to) his original intentions.

Imagery innervates your writing, takes it beyond yawing generalities and into the visceral, blood-soaked details. It is how, using your words and syntax and imagination, you create the world of your story in your reader’s mind. It engages all of the senses: vibrant, blinding colors; pungent, wafting smells; coarse, sandy textures; plunking, rolling sounds; sweet, buttery tastes.

If you try to tell a story using only generalizations and abstracts, you’re not only making your reader do all the hard (and fun!) work for you, but you’re leaving sperm-whale sized gaps in the mental images of your characters, settings, and scenes. You’re giving your reader nothing to inhale, nothing to shove into his pie-hole, nothing to see or feel or experience. Abstract writing feels very surreal, detached from the reality we know and love and understand.

Let’s go bounce the big red rubber ball of figurative language.

Cliches are old hat

I’m sure everyone has heard the “no cliches!” rule about four hundred and twenty six thousand times by now. It’s a simple one and easy to parrot, too: “Don’t use cliches! Cliches are bad! Ew, you hung out with a cliche? So gross.”

But why? Sure, the language is expected and tired. But is that really why we avoid using them?

“Nope,” says Oliver.

You should avoid cliches because they don’t actually cause your reader to think. Cliches are hollow. If you shoved a screwdriver into the seam of the cliche and cracked it open, you’d find nothing but some sad looking termites and a bit of old straw.

A cliche was born unto this world not-a-cliche. It was once a clever little unheard metaphor, flung wildly from the lips of some mirthful young dandy. But it was so clever that it was adopted into the lexicon of public discourse. The gears of time ground its meaning down to nothing, a nub of mental association, nothing clever or fresh about it.

A cliche, even one packed with specific images, has lost all of its power to spin up the imagine-engine of your mind. When someone says, “he really nailed it!” does anyone ever actually picture a hammer striking the blueish-grey metal head of a pristine nail, driving it into the oak with such force that tiny fragments of wood fly off like tiny forest fairies fleeing for their lives?

Nope. They just think, “Oh, he did that pretty well.”

This is why you can use cliches, if you rewrite them in such a way that makes your reader stop and actually imagine what you’re saying. I do it all the time and will defend to the death my own right to do that thing I want to do because I think it is fun.

I’ll show you how to tell me how to tell me how you’re showing

The piece of advice I’m sure you’ve heard even more times than “Cliche? Run away!” is “Show, don’t tell.” It’s another easy one to regurgitate into the awaiting mouths of nutrient-starved writers, but it is often misunderstood.

The idea is that you need to show an emotion or character trait or some other important facet without just telling your reader explictly what that thing is. It’s the difference between, “Carol fidgeted, her eyes darting towards the door ever few minutes” and “Carol was nervous.”

What makes the first one showing and the second one telling? Images. Imagery. Figurative language. Pictures drawn with words and forcefully placed into the reader’s brain through his eyeballs.

It’s that simple. Showing comes down to using effective imagery in your writing. There are no other magic methods or secret spells or ridiculous riddles. If you’re getting a lot of feedback saying, “show, don’t tell!” with no other qualifications, re-interpret that as, “I couldn’t really picture this correctly, and it gave me pause.”

When you start replacing abstracts and generalizations with concrete images that your reader can easily turn into a video of the action in their head, the problem of showing verses telling suddenly, as if by some divine writing miracle, disappears.

Costumes and props

If you could wander backstage before a Broadway play and pick through the meticulously prepared racks of costumes and props, you’d probably get a good sense of what the play was about well before you sat down in your seat. The style of costumes would probably give you a rough time period and the various props could easily inform what action was going to take place. If you found a bunch of long, tatty jackets, some battle-worn sabers, and some early flint-locks, you’d be bracing for nine straight hours of Les Mis.

Your imagery, out of context, should do the same. If I randomly shoved my hands into your story and pulled out some figurative descriptions, I should be able to construct an idea, or at the very least some kind of tone.

For example, if I find “boisterous spiky-haired New Jersians” I’m going to assume you’re writing a contemporary reality TV pilot. If I find “rain slicked black boots” and “mud and blood caked overalls” I’m going to think you’re writing a rural-murder-mystery (Dallas meets Conan Doyle, perhaps). Your imagery should be appropriate to the context of the story. It should always bring the reader in closer and never cause them to pull back and wonder why that image is in this story.

Your imagery also lugs a ton of context around in its purple Jansport backpack. When I mentioned some props and Les Mis, you probably automatically filled in the beards and hats and booming musical numbers. Our shared human experience fills in a lot of contextual gaps for us. A sword is also violence and power and authority. A cigar is not always just a cigar.

Beta Test

We dwell so deeply in our own minds that sometimes it is easy to forget that your tiny slice of the world as interpreted through your subjective view of the electromagnetic spectrum might be very different from someone else’s. An image you materialize with your power-packed science fingers might not make as much (or any) sense out in the honest, flaw-finding daylight of public view.

It’s good to take chances with your imagery – I encourage you to imagine huge, extreme, absurd – but it’s also good to have a straight-man hiding somewhere who can bring you back down and say, “while ‘the flower petal honed to razors-edge by the sperm-rain of a vengeful Grecian god’ is…interesting…it may not test well in your market.”

Test your images with readers who challenge your ideas and ask you to explain them. If you can’t explain them quickly, or at all, chances are it’s not a good image.

After you’ve wrangled your first draft, after you’ve fixed the glaring typos, after you’ve accepted the death of your favorite character, scrutinize your writing, search every clause for abstracts and non-concrete ideas. Replace them with images – as strong or weak as appropriate for their place in the story – and make your writing delight all your reader’s senses, not just her mind.

“Ortho Stice played with a kind of rigid, liquid grace, like a panther in a back-brace.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

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