CHAPTER THREE

MAKING METAPHORS

Metaphors are not user-friendly. They are difficult to find and difficult to use well. Unfortunately, metaphors are a mainstay of good lyric writing — indeed, of most creative writing. From total snores like “break my heart” and “feel the emptiness inside” to awakening shocks like “the arc of a love affair” (Paul Simon), “feather canyons” (Joni Mitchell), “soul with no leak at the seam” (Peter Gabriel), and “brut and charisma poured from the shadow” (Steely Dan), metaphors support lyrics like bones. The trick is to know how to build them.

In its most basic form, a metaphor is a collision between ideas that don't belong together. It jams them together and leaves us to struggle with the consequences. For example, an army is a rabid wolf.

We watch the soldiers begin to snarl, grow snouts, and foam at the teeth. The army disappears, and we are left to face something red-eyed and dangerous. Of course, an army isn't a wolf. All metaphors must be literally false. If the things we identify are the same (e.g., a house is a dwelling place), there is no metaphor, only definition. Conflict is essential for metaphor. Put things that don't belong together in the same room and watch the friction: dog with wind; torture with car; cloud with river.

Interesting overtones. Let's take a closer look. There are three types of metaphor:

An expressed identity metaphor asserts an identity between two nouns (e.g., fear is a shadow, a cloud is a sailing ship). Expressed identity metaphors come in three forms:

Run each of these through all three forms:

Now come up with a few of your own, and run them through all three forms. You might even try extending them into longer versions (e.g., clouds are sailing ships on rivers of wind).

A qualifying metaphor uses adjectives to qualify nouns, and adverbs to qualify verbs. Friction within these relationships creates a metaphor (e.g., hasty clouds, to sing blindly).

A verbal metaphor is formed by conflict between the verb and its subject and/or object (e.g., clouds sail, he tortured his clutch, frost gobbles summer down).

According to Aristotle, the ability to see one thing as another is the only truly creative human act. Most of us have the creative spark to make metaphors, we just need to train ourselves a bit and direct our energy properly.

Look at this metaphor from Percy Bysshe Shelley's “Ode to the West Wind”: “A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed / One too like thee…” Hours are links of a chain, accumulating weight and bending the old man's back lower and lower as each new hour is added, an interesting way to look at old age.

Great metaphors seem to come in a flare of inspiration — there is a moment of light and heat, and suddenly the writer sees the old man bent over, dragging a load of invisible hour-chains. But even if great metaphors come from inspiration, you can certainly prepare yourself for their flaring. The next section will help to train your vision, help you learn to look in the hot places, and help you nurture a spark that can erupt into something bright and wonderful.

PLAYING IN KEYS

Like musical notes, words can group together in close relationships, like belonging to the same key. Call this a diatonic relationship. For example, here are some random words that are diatonic to (in the same key as) tide: ocean, moon, recede, power, beach.

This is “playing in the key of tide,” where tide is the fundamental tone. This is a way of creating collisions between elements that have at least some things in common — a fertile ground for metaphors. There are many other keys tide can belong to when something else is a fundamental tone — for example, power. Let's play in its key: Muhammad Ali, avalanche, army, Wheaties, socket, tide.

All these words are related to each other by virtue of their relationship to “power.” If we combine them into little collisions, we can often discover metaphors:

Try playing in the key of moon: stars, harvest, lovers, crescent, astronauts, calendar, tide.

Essentially, a metaphor works by revealing some third thing that two ideas share in common. One good way of finding metaphors is by asking these two questions:

1. What characteristics does my idea (“tide”) have?

2. What else has those characteristics?

Answering the second question usually releases a veritable flood of possible metaphors.

Often, the relationship between two ideas is not clear. Muhammad Ali is hardly the first idea that comes to mind with avalanche, unless you recognize their linking term, power. In most contexts, Muhammad Ali and avalanche are non-diatonic, unrelated to each other. Only when you look to find a link do you come up with power, or deadly, or try to keep quiet when you're in their territories. Always asking the two questions above opens up these relationships and helps you develop metaphor-seeking habits. Here are several exercises to help you get hooked.

If you don't already have a writers' group, these exercises might be a good reason to start one. Just get some people together (even numbers are best) and start making arbitrary lists. Put your lists together and see what your combinations suggest.

One thing will become clear right away: You get better results combining nouns and verbs than from combining adjectives and nouns. Verbs are the power amplifiers of language. They drive it; they set it in motion. Look at any of the great poets — Yeats, Frost, Sexton, Eliot. If you actually go through some poems and circle their verbs, you will see why the poems crackle with power. Great writers know where to look. They pay attention to their verbs.

SIMILE

You learned in high school that the difference between metaphor and simile is that simile uses like or as. True enough, but that's like saying that measles are spots on your body. They are, but if you look deeper, the spots are there because a virus is present. There is something more fundamental going on. Remember the metaphor an army is a rabid wolf? Say it to yourself and let the pictures roll. You start with the army, but your focus transfers to the rabid wolf, something red-eyed and dangerous.

Simile doesn't transfer focus: An army is like a rabid wolf. Say it to yourself and let the pictures roll. The army refuses to budge. No snouts or foamy teeth. We sit waiting for an explanation while the army stands before us in full uniform.

Look at this from Kurt Thompson:

The metaphor sets up the car. The speaker is asking baby to get in and step on the accelerator. Now look at this version:

Read it again and let the pictures roll. Now the focus stays on the speaker rather than transferring to the car. So the emphasis in “baby won't you drive my heart” is on heart rather than drive. It seems like a subtle difference, but it makes all the difference in how we hear the song. The metaphor creates a light, clever song. The simile is clever, too, but it's also more intimate, since we stay in the presence of the speaker throughout the song.

Because a simile refuses to transfer focus, it works in a totally different way than a metaphor does. A metaphor takes its second term (an army is a rabid wolf) very seriously — you must commit to it, because that's what everyone will end up looking at.

You needn't commit as deeply to the second term of a simile, since the first term gets most of the attention. This makes similes useful as a one-time event. In a line like “I'm as corny as Kansas in August,” our focus stays on I. We have no further appetite for corn or Kansas. Good thing, since the rest of the song goes everywhere but Kansas. However, if the line had been “I am corn in Kansas in August,” we'd expect to hear things about sun, rain, wind, and harvest in the upcoming lines.

As a rule of thumb, when you have a list of comparisons in mind, use a simile:

When you're using only one comparison (e.g., love is a rose), and you want to commit to it throughout the song, use a metaphor. It only grows when it's on the vine.