I wrote this essay as a way to try to stay afloat in the bitter maelstrom of emotions I’ve been drowning in since losing my father. I’m honored that Tin House would consider it high enough quality for their site.
Without further pomp:
Browsing Tags voice
Craft and Draft: Metaphor Galore
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, and worth crawling through your yard with a zoom lens to see.” -Oliver Gray (copyright right now)
Craft and Draft: I’ll take words that start with “Ad” for $2000, Alex
Warning, this post contains explicit grammar that may not be appropriate for people who don’t like grammar. Words like participle and infinitive and adjectival will be used. Parental discretion is advised.
As a culture, we’re rapidly approaching critical mass of “stuff we need to remember.” Kick-off times, meeting times, departure times, closing times. Passwords, PINs, SSNs, and IPs. Some of us have to remember large, complicated matrices and formulas and numbers, others large, complicated designs and abstracts and ideas. We have to remember how our systems work, both technical and physical, where Microsoft decided to hide the “sort ascending button” in this version, who asked who out for beers, and that in order to cook dinner, the oven needs to be hot, and for it to be hot, it needs to be preheated.
There are so many pieces of information to store, catalog, and recall that it’s amazing our brains have time for anything else.
As a result of this constant data-bombardment we inevitably forget things that aren’t important to our daily survival. Things like the specifics of molecular structure or which side of the plate the salad fork goes on or to finally water that poor house plant in the corner of our bedroom. Our brains work like massive databases where the most relevant, frequently accessed, and important information is kept at the ready, while everything else is crammed and stuffed into parts of the brain that aren’t frequently visited. You haven’t completely forgotten the stuff down in the dusty tomes of your archive, but it takes some effort and a big Swiffer Duster to bring it back up to the light of your main study.
That’s where your grammar lives. Unless you’re a ferocious copy editor or the reincarnation of E.B. White, chances are your understanding of grammatical rules has sunk deeper than the Titanic.
That’s OK. I’m here to raise the wreck and help figure all this “grammar” stuff out.
“Ad” Words
I’ve read a lot of contemporary writing advice and the general consensus seems to be, “don’t use adverbs or adjectives unless you really need to.”
In a literary vacuum this is good advice. Don’t write “He walked aimlessly” when you could write “He sauntered.” A good verb will almost always trump a bad verb with an glued-on adverb trying to pick up the syntactic slack.
But to avoid using adverbs and adjectives at all would lead to peculiar if not nigh unreadable language. You could avoid using single world adverbs and adjectives for a while, but to give no description to any of your nouns or any of your verbs seems masochistic for the reader and sadistic for the writer.
The explanation is simple: don’t rely on single words, use phrases. A phrase is a group of words that can stand for a single part of speech. For example, “He ran up the bank of the river.” The simple sentence is, “He ran.” But that sentence is boring and non-specific and no one wants to read it. Enter the adverbial phrase, “up the bank of the river.” Now we know where he ran. That whole string of words equals a single adverbial phrase (it’s also a prepositional phrase, but we’ll ignore that for now).
Of course, you can overuse phrases just like you can overuse single words and turn your prose into an insipid nightmare of nothing but pointless, unwavering description. But let’s pretend you won’t do that because you know better. Please don’t do that. It hurts our brains.
An important thing to remember about a phrase is that it does not contain a subject and predicate, meaning it isn’t a sentence or a clause. “Under the waves” is a phrase because it clearly doesn’t have a subject or predicate (or verb for that matter), it only functions to describe where, in some other, imaginary sentence.
There are two types of phrases: prepositional phrases (which, to everyone’s alarm, contain prepositions) and verbal phrases (which in turn has three sub-forms: infinitives, past participles, and present participles.) For now, we’ll just focus on how to identify and use the larger concepts of adverbial and adjectival phrases, regardless of their status as prepositions or verbals.
To help you understand how adverbial and adjectival phrases work, I’ve called on my friends: “Adjectival Arwen” and “Adverbial Aragorn.”
They are currently in post production of “Lord of the Ings: Two Gerunds”, slated for a 2027 release.
Adjectival Arwen rides towards Rivendell in a saddle made of soft leather
As a refresher (no one is judging anyone here) an adjective is a word (or series of words) that describes a noun. The word “Adjectival” in Arwen’s name is itself an adjective (I’m so meta). You know these words and use them all the time: drunken, sharp, red, gooey, awkward, etc. They add specificity to the noun, so the reader knows exactly which subject the writer meant. You could say “the man” which could mean any random dude, or you could say, “the man with the giant purple mustache” which pretty much points directly to a specific, crazy guy.
Adjectives give nouns unique identity. Arwen is not just an elf. She is a pretty elf who wields Hadhafang, sword of the Elven queens. Adjectives!
We use adjectival phrases all the time without really thinking about it. Any time you try to describe your subject, you’re using an adjectival phrase. It can be as simple as describing the look of something, “Arwen dyed her flowing hair bright red” (she didn’t just dye her hair, she dyed it a specific color) or as complicated as an appositive, which completely renames the noun, “Arwen, only daughter of Elrond of Rivendell, rode out to meet the battle.”
The key thing to remember her is that adjectival phrases always reference a noun. If something is describing the verb, or explaining how/where/when/why the action happened, it can’t be an adjectival phrase.
Adverbial Aragorn fights the orcs valiantly
Adverbs are the beasts that labor in the fields of our language, doing most of the heavy lifting and manual labor. They are words or phrases that describe verbs. These are often the “-ly” forms of adjectives (drunkenly, hazily) but can come in many other flavors.
An adverbial phrase always describes a verb in the sentence. If “Aragorn swings Narsil with the might of his Dúnedain ancestors,” the adverbial phrase (“with the might of”) describes the way he swings. It emphasizes and explains the action of the verb, giving sentence some spice, and clarifying just how the action took place. That adverbial phrase also contains a secondary adjectival phrase that describes what kind of might he was swinging with. Sweet.
All of this stuff builds on itself. Look at the basic sentence first, “Aragorn swings Narsil” then the adverbial “with the might” then the adjectival “of his Dúnedain ancestors.” It’s like a Russian doll of phrases, all of which eventually gives you a sentence that describes multiple things in specific ways.
So, adjectival phrases modify nouns, adverbial phrases modify verbs. All pretty simple, right? You’ll be able to use these left and right, with purpose, to make your writing all awesome now, right?
Right?
If you’re confused, that’s OK. Sentence variation in English is damn near infinite. You can and will have adjectival phrases inside of adverbial phrases that are part of compound predicates with multiple verbs that may or may not be prepositional. They may be part of a direct object or a subject compliment or just a tulle dress that you put on your subject to make it fancier so it will get more attention during its debutante ball. The great part about understanding these rules is that you can intentionally play with them and have fun with your writing, which, with practice, eventually becomes a part of your style and voice.
I know I’ve dumped a lot of ideas on you and presented a lot of unqualified terms. If anyone has any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.
I’ll cover more next week. These guy may pay a visit:
For the record, this is The Pirate of Prepositions, The Appositive Adventurer, and The Clause Clown. They mean business.
How to be a Guest on a Podcast
I love trying new things so much that last week I did my first ever podcast with Josh Fortunatus over at Thoughts Weigh Heavy.
I’d never considered doing a podcast which may or may not have been directly related to never having been asked to do a podcast.
Come hear me make sweeping generalizations and bold, unsupported statements about beer tasting and what makes good writing! Marvel at my ability to use the word “subjective” 12 times in one sentence! Be amazed at my comparison of beer and Mountain Dew!
If you’d like to put a voice to my words, you can check out the stream here (there’s also a picture of me drinking Bass and being overwhelmingly dapper):
If you find yourself in a situation where your pods are to be cast, I suggest the following:
Things you’ll need:
-A computer with Google Voice or a working telephone (required)
-Vocal chords and a brain (required)
-A list of talking points and or questions (optional)
-Your most conversational tone (optional)
-Beer (required)
1. Mentally Prepare
Podcasts are serious business, especially when you plan to talk about beer and writing and more beer. Be sure to lose sleep over what you’re going to say, and do your best to psyche yourself out by constantly second guessing why anyone would want to talk to you, never mind record it.
Double extra bonus points if you pre-write a script that you end up not using because it’s near impossible to script a casual conversation.
2. Be ready to answer quickly, without really considering whether the answer is right or wrong or insane
The worst possible thing you could do is sound vapid and vacant in the middle of your chat. To avoid this, when asked questions you’re not 100% sure how to answer, jump to conclusions. No one will call you out on it probably.
3. Be friendly and assertive and don’t swear at your host or say anything about your nervousness related gastric issues
Everyone will appreciate that.
4. Listen to the podcast before you share it and pray that your host was gracious with his editing
Smile and thank your host when he was gracious with his editing.
5. Have fun, be yourself
Because, well, what’s the point otherwise?
Josh released an album on September 4, titled “Raise D’etre.” You should check it out if you like good music and good people doing good things.
