![]() ![]() Origin: in ancient game of lawn bowling, a rub is a fault in the surface of the green that stops a bowl or diverts it from its intended direction. ![]() So how do we take these humble parts of speech and use them to enrich our novels? How do we turn the mundane into the sublime without resorting to clichés? My ex-husband is like a snake in the grass. Pause for definition: What’s the difference between metaphor and simile? (I sometimes get this wrong, but then I can’t get the lay-lie thing right either.) When done well, a metaphor also ignites some special spark of recognition in your reader, where they say to themselves, “Yes! I see that! I know exactly what he is trying to tell me.” By portraying a person, place, thing, or action as being something else, a metaphor gives us a more vivid description or helps us understand something better. In simplest terms, a metaphor is a figure of speech that makes a comparison between two seemingly unlike objects or concepts. And while all of us have gotten to the fork in the road, more than a few of us lament the road not taken. We open cans of worms and close the books on things. We shoot down arguments and bottle up our anger. We eat our hearts out and are starved for affection. We use metaphors to make sense of the world around us, to make the abstract concrete. I don’t think we even realize how much because they are so ingrained in our language, a sort of shared currency of comparison that we all use. Metaphors and similes permeate our lives. Devin Nunes called the guys trying to shut down the government “lemmings in suicide vests.” Makes me long for the good old days of top-rate political metaphor, like when Rep. But then I sat through a day of cable TV political news wherein I discovered that…īut that might lead us down a slippery slope…īecause all we’re doing is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic… If you think about it too hard you’re not doing it right. I’m of the mind that the metaphor (and its sister the simile) is a lot like sex. Normally, I don’t give metaphors much thought. I guess one question is, when is a metaphor finished so you can use another one? We covered this in college, of course, but I would appreciate a review.” At some point, would y’all please write about metaphors–particularly the danger of mixing metaphors. One of our regulars, Jim Porter, has asked us to devote a post to the subject: “I quote Bobcat, when he was Bobcat. Which brings us, quite vividly, to our topic of the day – the metaphor. I’m a smudge of excrement on a tissue surging out to sea with a million tons of raw sewage.” I’m a thumbprint on the window of a skyscraper. “Half my life is over, and I have nothing to show for it. Miles descends into a funk fog and laments to his friend Jack: So I get to the scene in Sideways where erstwhile novelist Miles has just learned his latest 800-page doorstop has been rejected yet again. There are a handful of these movies I return to again and again – Moonstruck, Casablanca, Bull Durham, The Godfather, Chinatown, Lawrence of Arabia, The Apartment - just to try to see how the magic is done. I watch it over and over, not only because I enjoy it but also because of what it teaches me about writing great dialogue. I was watching one of my favorite movies recently, Sideways. People remember these metaphors because they are so vivid you can’t get free of them. Every one of my stories is a metaphor you can remember. “Do you know why teachers use me? Because I speak in tongues.
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