wrassling a metaphor

[marycatelli]

Sometimes it can be really difficult to wrassle that metaphor down to the ground.

It's not the avoiding cliches so much.  True, it can be a problem because of the appropriateness issue, but it's not the big one.

There's nailing down the meaning and getting a metaphor that actually illuminates it rather that swaps sideways at it in general.

And then there's the point-of-view questions.  The right metaphor will, as a sideline, describe both character and world.   But I have seen an author describe a man looking at something like a man in the desert at water, and going on and on about because the character didn't live near any deserts, or at a time where she would have heard a lot about them.  Rather than going for something closer to home, like a storm-tossed mariner finally seeing land.  A becalmed mariner who feels the wind?  No, that's a moving thing, not a stay-in-one-place thing, which was the connotation of the metaphor. . . .

And the connotation is where things get even more ugly.  It's why cliches become cliches.  Why are your hero's eyes emerald green, or grass green?  Because poison green, or snake green, does not incline your readers toward him in the appropriate way.  Vice versa for the villain, of course, but getting your metaphor to pull their own weight rhetorically is where you really manage to compact maximum meaning in minimum wordage.

Comments

[alivion.livejournal.com]

Raymond Chandler is a master of metaphors. He almost never uses anything cliche; all his metaphors get the point across neatly while telling us exactly what the narrator is thinking and feeling at the time.
In the novel I just finished, the narrator said that a woman gave him "one of those looks that's supposed to make your spine feel like a run in a silk stocking".

[izuko.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, that metaphor leaves me wondering what the hell he's trying to say.

[marycatelli]

I think it feels like you just got your spine ripped out. . . but that is one of the troubles of metaphors.

[marycatelli]

Oh yeah.

Made metaphors a signature of the hardboiled school

[izuko.livejournal.com]

I've noticed a tendency for people to really not understand the purpose behind metaphors and analogies. If it doesn't match, in every possible way, then it must be a bad comparison. Say what?

Metaphors and analogies are like Taylor series polynomials - they approximate the function over a short range, but no more.

[marycatelli]

I have pointed out to people that of course my analogy is inexact, all analogies are inexact, an analogy that was exact would cease to be an analogy -- and got surprised responses of that's true since only a thing is exactly like itself.