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How Can I Write an Original Metaphor?
Hint: It’s not while you’re writing.
You’re sitting in your writing spot, keyboard under your fingertips, ready to write something powerful.
You want to highlight an experience and connect with your readers. The perfect metaphor will do the trick. The problem? You and 1000+ other writers choose the same thing. Your power-punch to emotionally connect with readers falls down the drain.
Metaphors are hard.
It’s difficult to come up with something original and all the best ones are taken.
I read prose from F. Scott Fitzgerald and I am jealous of how effectively he uses imagery and metaphors to add a deeper level to his writing.
Consider The Great Gatsby.
You have the classic finishing line: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” This powerful metaphor compares rowers and their difficulty beating a current with the struggle of the characters in the novel trying to build a future out of the past.
The novel is flooded with great metaphors.
I love this one in Chapter 2: “At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment houses.” Notice how Fitzgerald uses two opposite things (a car stopping near apartments vs. a white cake) to paint an image of what the scene looked like in our heads.
Great metaphors spark our imagination and connect with our emotions.
How You Can Craft Original Metaphors
“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”― Henry David Thoreau
Remove thinking of metaphors from your writing process. Instead of trying to invent something in front of the computer or while sitting in front of your writing desk, put the focus on curiosity.
I think of Leonardo Da Vinci and his famous sketches, along with some of the documented inquiries of Benjamin Franklin. Both invented, innovated, and changed the future.
The main trait they had was an obsession with curiosity. But not just a love for it, a…
