This week I am sharing an excerpt from my new book Writing and Publishing Personal Essays, just out from Silver Threads in San Diego. The excerpt demonstrates the power of extended metaphor for writing the essay.

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Telling It How It Never Was to Find Out How It Is

One of the exercises you can use to help yourself warm up for comparison and contrast thinking is the simile making exercise I introduced in the description chapter. It helps you realize how things that are different are also alike. A doorknob is like a knee. Drop earrings are like tetherballs.

Facility in using constructions like this will help you learn to write comparison and contrast essays. For instance, if you said, “Writing is like mining for gold,” you could explain the writing process in terms of gold mining—what equipment is needed, how to pan in the river of information, how to recognize a nugget, and what to do with it. This mining may not be anything like the way you hoped writing would be — well-shaped essays, stories, and poems that appear rapidly on you computer screen, as unstoppable as pedestrians crossing New York’s streets.

If you said, “My old boyfriend was like a McDonald’s,” you might find yourself writing about how unsatisfying the relationship was — the same old menu, the pre-spread ketchup-mustard combo on the rolls meant to please without taking a stand, the flashy packaging over the skimpy meal. This relationship may be nothing like the one you’d hope to have, the one you’d compare to the Louvre filled with beautiful treasures.

 To use metaphoric thinking as a warm-up exercise, make a list of people and activities in your life and compare them to things you have never compared them to before. For example: “Arguing is like rowing with one oar” or, “My mother is like a library.” Next, take one of the metaphors from your list and extend the analogy, as in the gold panning and writing example or the relationship and MacDonald’s example. Continue talking about one subject in terms of another. Some of what you say may seem silly, but keep going. Metaphorical thinking can help you be brilliant on the page!

In the following example essay, Sam Turner compares writing to playing ball to show us how unrealistic expectations get in the way of our writing.

Writing (Almost Anything) Requires Stepping Up to the Plate

It’s always interesting to me how some people will quit before they start. Whether it is some hidden failure they had in the first grade, or an embarrassing moment sometime in their life, I can tell that they have probably given up before they started: “Oh, I can’t sing . . . play the piano . . . dance . . . draw . . . write poetry.” You pick the subject; someone will tell you they can’t do it. Ask the second question, “Why not?” and the answer is usually, “I never could.” Or, “I tried once and . . .”

Yet, these same folks may have been good in baseball, basketball, track, or swimming. They will freely admit that they had to practice in order to become a valuable member of the team. They understand that, no matter how good they are, they are not always going to step to the plate and hit a home run. They might even (perish the thought) actually strike out. They know that they won’t stop taking piano lessons just because no one asked them to perform in the symphony after the first lesson. People expect to have to practice the piano, basketball, baseball, or golf. They know it takes months and years of practice.

Why then, are they surprised when they don’t hit a “home run” the first time they attempt to draw a picture or write a poem? Place a blank page in front of them and ask them to write something, anything about themselves and they react with panic. I often tell my adult students that, if they can talk, they can write. No one says that the first words they put on the paper will be captured by an agent and sold for a million dollars. Maybe they are afraid of making a mistake. Why do they continue to swing at the ball, shoot for the basket, swing the club? They know that, eventually, things will connect and they’ll succeed.

Now, if you are convinced that maybe you can write, just a little, start with something simple. How about a letter to a relative or friend – someone you have been meaning to write to anyway? Tell them that you are planning to take up writing. You could also take a writing workshop or a poetry workshop and let the presenter be your “coach.” Join a writer’s group. Meet people who enjoy writing.

Take a class at your local junior college for non-credit and learn some new techniques for writing. Read books: not just books on writing, but novels, and non-fiction. Read. Gradually, you will begin to prefer the writing styles of some authors better than others. Keep a journal. Write something every day. Even a sentence will do to start. Just think of it as stepping up to the plate.

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I enjoyed putting this book together, updating publishing information and locating new essays to share in a way that helps those who want to write the personal essay learn how to construct essays that hold together and come to insight. For those of you who are interested in reading another sample chapter please visit the publisher’s site.