Last week we discussed poems in Rebecca McClanahan’s impressive collection, Deep Light. This week, we hear from her as a skillful user of figurative language and enjoy the exceptional opportunity to learn how to stretch our metaphor making muscles. The following work is an abridged version of Chapter 5 from Word Painting: A Guide to Writing More Descriptively by Rebecca McClanahan. We reprint it with the kind permission of the author.

Figuratively Speaking: A “Perception of Resemblances”
By Rebecca McClanahan

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor

–Wallace Stevens, from Opus Posthumous

On a rainy Wednesday morning, my phone rings. The man at the other end of the line identifies himself as a business writer; a mutual acquaintance has given him my name. “He says you can help me with my writing. It’s too cut and dried. It needs something. I’m not too keen on that fancy stuff, but…”

“Fancy stuff?” I say.

“Similes and symbols and all that. I’m just trying to get across information.

With me, what you see is what you get.”

“How can I help you?”

“I thought you could help make my writing more poetic. You know, more descriptive. I’ve got all the important stuff down. I just need to stick in some metaphors and similes.”

 Tempted as I am to schedule a consulting appointment with the caller (it’s been a slow month, and I could use the money), I find myself, of all things, being honest. I tell the man that yes, I’d be happy to look at his writing, but no, I won’t help him “stick in” metaphors and similes. That’s not the way it works, I say. Metaphor isn’t something you insert after the fact. It’s not just something you say, a mere figure of speech; it’s a way of perceiving the world.

He thanks me politely and hangs up. I hadn’t meant to be discouraging, but talking about metaphor always has this effect on me. Is any literary term more misunderstood? How many times have I seen students “stick in” a simile or metaphor right before they hand in a first draft? For that matter, how many times have I stared at one of my own dying sentences, laboring to conjure a figure of speech that might save it, only to have the manuscript returned by my editor with the sentence marked “Seems contrived.”

Of course it seemed contrived. It was contrived. In my desperation for the telling phrase, the perfect image, I forgot my own advice: Metaphor, like all components of successful description, begins in the eye and ear of the beholder. It isn’t a fancy embroidery stitch, something with which to embellish the surface of a written piece. It’s the whole cloth out of which the writing is formed. Even Aristotle, who tended to view metaphor as separable from language, something which could be grafted onto a piece of writing to achieve a specific effect, nevertheless conceded that the source of metaphor could not be willed. “It is the mark of great natural ability,” he wrote, “for the ability to use metaphor well implies a perception of resemblances.”

Does this mean that as far as metaphor is concerned, a writer either has it or he doesn’t? Some writers seem to have been born wrapped in a caul of figurative language. Similes seep through their pores; they breathe in metaphor. The use of figurative language seems more closely related to a writer’s natural temperament than to the form or content of the writing. Some gifted poets use little or no metaphor, while prose writers like Zora Neale Hurston take long luxurious swims in its waters:

Janie stood where he left her for unmeasured time and thought. She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her. Then she went inside there to see what it was. It was her image of Jody tumbled down and shattered. But looking at it she saw that it never was the flesh and blood figure of her dreams. Just something she had grabbed up to drape her dreams over…She had no more blossomy openings dusting pollen over her man, neither any glistening young fruit where the petals used to be. She found that she had a host of thoughts she had never expressed to him, and numerous emotions she had never let Jody know about. Things packed up and put away in parts of her heart where he could never find them.

–from Their Eyes Were Watching God

Like the ongoing debate of nature vs. nurture, the debate of whether metaphor can be learned could go on indefinitely. For our purposes, let’s consider that both sides, nature and nurture, play a role in a writer’s use of figurative language. Yes, it appears that some people are more naturally tuned to receive messages from the metaphoric universe. But we can all increase our ability to recognize resemblances in the world around us. And once we recognize these resemblances, we can learn to shape and reshape the expression of the resemblances, the metaphors we have been given.

What is Metaphor? Because metaphor is the mother of universal connections, I view all forms of figurative language–in fact, all original turns of phrases–as metaphor’s offspring. Figurative language is too cold and confining to describe the “perception of resemblances” that radiates from the natural world and the world of the imagination; the phrase places too much emphasis on the words being used rather than on the perception beneath the words. However, for purposes of clarity I’ll defer to centuries of literary criticism and define my terms in more traditional ways.

Literal language means, literally, what it says. It follows the denotation of a word, its meaning as defined by the dictionary. Figurative language, on the other hand, doesn’t mean exactly what it says. It strays from denotation and moves toward connotation, those overtones a word acquires over time. Figurative language usually implies (or overtly states) a comparison between two things. These comparisons are called figures of speech. Metaphor has traditionally been considered the most prominent figure of speech. It derives from the Greek metaphora, which breaks into two parts: meta (“over”) and pherein (“to carry”). Moving vans in Greece are often marked with the word Metaphora to suggest the transfer of items from one place to another. Metaphor occurs when one thing, or part of one thing, is carried over into another. An imaginative transfer takes place.

Usually, this carrying over is accomplished through images. These need not be visual images, though figures of speech usually form sense impressions; abstractions almost never act as transfers. The earliest uses of metaphor stretch to include any transfer of a word from its ordinary application to another application, whether it involves a comparison or not. In contemporary usage, however, metaphor suggests a comparison between two seemingly unlike things.

A metaphor always requires two parts, two sides, to complete its equation. The critic I. A. Richards calls these two sides the “tenor” and the “vehicle.” The tenor is the main subject or the “general drift,” is usually a thing but can also be an idea, an emotion, or some other abstraction. The vehicle is the concrete image that embodies the main subject, supplying it with weight, shape, and substance. For instance, in “He carried his guilt like a heavy suitcase,” guilt is the tenor and suitcase is the vehicle.

In the passage from Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston’s tenors (main ideas) include time, thought, emotions, and dreams. Her vehicles (concrete objects and images that carry the main ideas) include a shelf, a drape or blanket, pollen, fruit, petals, and “things packed away.” But Hurston does more than simply show relationships between tenors and vehicles. Reading the passage, I didn’t think, “Oh yes, Janie’s heart is like a closet lined with shelves of memories.” I didn’t visualize a blanket draped over a dream, or imagine pollen floating down on a man. Instead, I was taken into a world I’d never entered before, Janie’s inner world of disillusionment and lost dreams. Effective metaphor does more than shed light on the two things being compared. It actually brings to the mind’s eye something, which has never before been seen. It’s not just the marriage ceremony linking two things; it’s the child born from the union. An original and imaginative metaphor brings something fresh into the world. In the interaction between two things being compared, a new image or idea is formed.

Discovering Original Metaphors The description I’ve included from Zora Neale Hurston’s novel succeeds not only because of its striking and sustained metaphors but also because those metaphors appear to be deeply felt, springing organically from an authentic source. The writer has not “stuck in” metaphors after the fact; rather, they appear as natural outgrowths of the way the narrator sees, and feels, her way through the world. Hurston’s metaphors reflect a perception of resemblances richer and deeper than any mere figure of speech.

When images emerge naturally, when the perception of resemblances makes itself known, it’s not fancy at work, but imagination. (The distinction between fancy and imagination was first made by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Biographia Literaria.) In fancy, the writer is concerned with making or assembling images; fancy is a mechanical facility, which calls attention to its own construction. When my editor wrote, “Seems contrived” in the margin of my manuscript beside the drummed-up metaphor, she was distinguishing between imagination and fancy. Fancy relies solely upon labor. When we’re employing fancy, we feel ourselves reaching out, fetching. That’s why our results often seem farfetched; we’ve fetched them from afar.

Imagination, on the other hand, isn’t a mere assembling of likenesses but an almost effortless blending of images into a unified whole. But how does this blending occur? How can we encourage metaphors to emerge organically in our writing? Coleridge offers a hint: the difference between fancy and imagination depends, in great degree, upon the emotional involvement of the writer. Images, he says, “become proofs of original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant passion.”

“Original genius.” Hmm. Originality is a subject that comes up often in literary discussions. My students, especially those of college-age and beyond, talk a lot about originality, by which they seem to mean something weird or odd or completely, dazzlingly incoherent. Some expend enormous amounts of effort trying to look and act the part of the “original” artist, searching out the funkiest clothes and the latest night spots, leaving little energy for their writing. Some complain that their metaphors are hopeless, that they just can’t think of anything that’s new enough, strange enough.

“Everything’s already been said,” one student moans. “And by better minds than mine.”

“I don’t have an original bone in my body,” says another.

“Did you hear what you just said?” I say. “That’s exactly where your originality lies. In each bone of your body.”

I go on to explain the origin of “originality”: “origin.” Origin, as in source, spring, primary being. We are most original when we are most ourselves. Only then are we close to our first source, our fueling passions.

Discovering the source of original passion should be the most natural thing in the world, right? “It’s as clear as the nose on your face,” my grandmother used to say. In fact, the nose on our face isn’t clear to us at all. It’s clear only to others, or to ourselves when we’re looking in a mirror. Sometimes we are simply too close to our origins to recognize them. When our writing is going well, it’s often because it’s springing naturally from an original source. We are writing from our passions. This doesn’t mean we are necessarily writing about our passions, or even about ourselves. But our passions, the sources of our originality, are fueling the writing. When we are writing from the center of ourselves, our metaphors are organic, unforced, springing from imagination rather than fancy.

Beginning writers, especially children, usually draw naturally on original sources. They don’t know any better, and ignorance serves them well. They write only, as Samuel Butler once advised, “what refuses to go away,” what matters most to them. Those of us who have been writing for a while sometimes lose our way. The act of writing–that solitary, sometimes joyous and sometimes agonizing but always passionate act–gets mixed up with publishing and competition and success and failure and reviews and deadlines. We forget why we began writing in the first place. Like the nouveau millionaire who leaves the little town that formed him, we forget where we came from. We lose our origins–and with it, our originality.

Finding Your Personal Constellation of Images The poet Stanley Kunitz, who has written and published for over seventy years, once called the sources of a writer’s originality her “constellation of images.” If a writer never discovers her constellation, Kunitz said, she may produce adequate, even good, work; but the work will never rise above superficiality. In Kunitz’ poems, his constellation of images revolves around the central star, his father. The loss surrounding his father’s death (his father committed suicide six weeks before Kunitz was born) supplies the metaphor that informs everything he writes. Kunitz calls his father’s suicide the “nexus” linking every image, every metaphor, of his work.

An early event in your life can shape your metaphorical constellation. For me, it was the death of an infant sister the year I was born, an event which shaped not only my role in the family drama, but the images of death and survivorship that would eventually emerge in my poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. For many years after I began writing and publishing I was not conscious of my personal metaphor, my “one small grief” as I would later call it. I discovered my constellation of images partly through the writing process itself and partly through the comments of editors and readers; it was as plain as the nose on my face, at least to them.

Little by little, as I studied the metaphors running through my work, the clues came together: sidekicks, sisters, decoys, hand-me-downs, skin grafts, rubber dolls, twins, doubles, even my penchant for compound words. Dead and lost children haunted my fiction, as did childless women and men. Even my comic stories contained images of the double–remember my reference, in an earlier chapter, to the freemartin, the female calf of a twin bull? To this day, I continue to work and rework the central myth of the double. If my metaphors are original, it’s simply because they arise organically from my origin, my life source.

Childhood events aren’t the only forces that shape a writer’s vision. Your present-day preoccupations, interests, and obsessions can provide you with original metaphors, as well as the subjects you discover through research or accident. Look back over your writing. Reread your stories, poems, and essays, noting successful images or metaphors, those passages, which seem to have sprung from imagination, not fancy. Notice what you’ve taken time and care to describe–description is one of the entries into metaphor. If you keep a journal or a writer’s notebook, reread old entries. Circle recurring images, descriptions, or isolated words; if the entries are stored in a computer, you can even do a search to see how often a particular word or phrase occurs. This process can help you discover your inner “constellation of images,” the ruling passions that fuel your most original work.

Too coldhearted or objective an assessment won’t help at this delicate stage. Like the centipede who was proceeding quite nicely, thank you, until he stopped to consider which leg went after which, we don’t want to become too preoccupied with the how and when of each step of the writing process. But a calm, inquisitive approach to our own processes can be instructive. Paying attention to recurring motifs in our work can help us discover the sources of our originality. It can also increase our ability to extend isolated metaphors, resulting in richer, fuller descriptions.

Extending Metaphors Once you’ve discovered your original images, you can use and reuse those images in new ways. Monet’s overwhelming passion for water served him well throughout his career. Even when he wasn’t painting water he was painting water. His smokestacks and meadows seem liquid, his trees mast-like, his trunks and branches like rivers. In the self-portrait of 1917, his cheekbones seem to be made of wave-like particles. Even his brush strokes are watery. Monet extended his ruling metaphor to include not only ordinary water, but mist, fog, and ice–even steam from passing locomotives. One way to write richer descriptions is to extend one of your original metaphors. Let’s say you’ve discovered images of plants recurring in your work. But they’re merely mentioned, then abandoned; they aren’t leading to full-fledged descriptions. Try writing down all the words or images you associate with plants–you might use a thesaurus to get started. Free associate, listing everything that comes to mind. Your list might include leaf, bud, stem, seed, water, roots, compost, moss, darkness, green, swamp, trowel, greenhouse, oxygen, rubber boots, roses, thorns. As you continue, one image will lead to another; thorns might lead you to write blood, for instance, which might lead to circulation.

If the words in your list begin to diverge from your original idea, don’t worry. You can always return to your root word–or you might find that the free association journey leads to more interesting connections than you’d planned. If you’re especially tuned to the sounds of words, their musical qualities might lead you further into the metaphorical world. This happens to me often, and it always surprises me. When I began “Sidekick,” which later evolved into a long catalog poem, I thought it would be a short lyric. After all, I had only two images–the image of a comic’s straight man, and Michelangelo’s image of the martyred St. Bartholomew being reunited with his flayed skin. But as I began to write, one word called up another. “Straight man” led to “ploy,” which led to the rhymed “decoy.” The image of “decoy” demanded “bobbing,” which called, musically and visually, for “back up singers with their benign doo-wops.” The metaphor kept growing in this way, propelled not by an overall idea or motif, but by the actual process of placing one word after the other.

The shapes, rhythms, and sounds of words suggest other shapes, rhythms, and sounds, which can extend a single metaphor, forming a universe of connections. We can also extend a metaphor by studying the technical world from which the metaphor emerged. Your isolated and spotty plant images, for instance, might expand into full descriptions if you consult a gardening book, a botany text, or schematic drawings that depict a plant’s inner workings. In his novel Ingenious Pain, Andrew Miller describes a boy’s fascination with William Harvey’s sketches of the human body:

But it is the pictures which snare him: the world beneath the skin; the skein of guts, the globes and bulbs of the great organs; the sheets of muscle strapped around the trellis of the bones; the intricate house of the heart, veins and arteries radiating, curling, branching into tiny tributaries.

Although the boy is presented as a character, not the author himself, the description has the feel of firsthand observation. Perhaps, like the curious boy, Miller stared at Harvey’s sketches until he began to see the other worlds contained within the world of the body–the skeins and globes and trellises and houses. Our metaphors can grow out of research, eye-search, and even I-search, that ransacking of memory that so often yields surprise treasures. In the case of your plant images, for instance, can you recall an early experience that shaped the obsession? The memory may contain within it details you’d temporarily forgotten.

An isolated metaphor, when given attention, can yield a whole family of metaphors, resulting in rich and sensual descriptions. Sometimes we’re not sure where an image is leading, but we feel instinctively that it is important. At this point, we may feel the way Ingmar Bergman says he feels when he’s first conceiving a film:

It is a mental state…abounding in fertile associations and images. Most of all, it is a brightly colored thread sticking out of the dark sack of the unconscious. If I begin to wind up this thread, and do it carefully, a complete film will emerge.

Winding up the thread of a metaphor requires patience and trust. We must believe that connections will be made along the way. Provided that our metaphor has emerged from imagination rather than fancy, these connections will probably grow naturally as the writing proceeds. But what about those times when our metaphors do not grow naturally, when an isolated image remains a single thread we’re unable to wind into a fully developed description?

Sometimes the best thing to do is to stop worrying about it. Metaphor is only one of many methods for achieving effective description. In fact, too much metaphor can harm our writing, calling attention to itself, or to ourselves, at the expense of the fictional dream. In Writing Fiction, Janet Burroway suggests that “metaphor is to some degree always self-conscious” and that a bad metaphor “produces a sort of hiccup in the reader’s involvement.” Prose writers, especially, might wish to heed Aristotle’s advice: overuse of metaphor can make prose too much like poetry. Even if your aim is more poetic prose, metaphor may not be the best way to achieve the goal. Your reader may suffer for your overindulgence.

However, if you feel that your work lacks imagination and you wish to increase your power to perceive metaphoric resemblances, you can take some practical steps. Two have already been suggested–that you write directly from your passions, those things which “refuse to go away,” and that you begin to trace the “constellation of images” that emerge in your life and work.

Another step is to respect your natural writing style and stay true to it, trusting that metaphors will emerge in their own good time. My friend, the writer Frye Gaillard, confesses that metaphor does not come easily to him. Instead, he focuses on word choice and on the cadences of his sentences, two of his natural writerly gifts. By focusing on what he does well and avoiding any self-conscious “sticking in” of metaphor simply for the sake of metaphor, his writing proceeds smoothly. Occasionally he’s even rewarded by the appearance of an apt, original figure of speech that grows organically from his attention to the diction and rhythms of his language.

As in John Lennon’s adage about life, metaphor sometimes happens while you’re busy doing something else. You can exercise the muscles of metaphor even when you’re not writing, through any activity that tricks your mind into making connections between seemingly unlike things.