(Hi, folks! For the time being, some, most, or all of the fol­low­ing links will still revert back to the orig­i­nal Writ­ing About Writ­ing web­page over on Blog­ger. This is not a mis­take. It just takes a long time to move thou­sands of arti­cles. Thank you for your patience as we nav­i­gate this tran­si­tion.)

Writing Metaphors

Some­times when I try to tell peo­ple what writ­ing is like, they look at me like I have grown six new ten­drilly appendages, each end­ing in a tiny lit­tle Bea Arthur head that is singing “Achey Breaky Heart” as a round.  So I often use a metaphor to help illus­trate it. “Oh, well, it’s like X,” where­in the val­ue for X is some pret­ty wacky shit.  (This makes them look at me only as if I just told them I thought Hawk­eye was the best Avenger, so I take it as a win.) Writ­ers can be pret­ty zany when it comes to metaphors. Stephen King, in his book On Writ­ing uses no less that half a dozen major writ­ing metaphors from fix­ing a screen door to dri­ving in the fog at night to unearthing the fos­silized remains of a dinosaur… that will no doubt come to life and eat chil­dren.

Why do we do this?  It’s just one of those bull­shit art­sy things that bull­shit artists do.  We find con­nec­tions between things that most oth­ers would­n’t expect.  If we get rich and famous peo­ple find our imag­i­na­tion delight­ful and charm­ing, and on talk shows they say things like “How did you ever come up with that?”

But until then, they think we’re a lit­tle on the absurd side.

Writ­ing is like WOW.  Con­sid­er your tal­ent build care­ful­ly.
5 Rea­sons Why Writ­ing Is More Like Dri­ving a Car Than You’re Prob­a­bly Com­fort­able With
Art is the Keysi/JKD/Krav Maga of Get­ting Shit Done
Increas­ing Blog Traffic–Accumulating Trib­u­taries
Tal­ent: A +5 Sword That You Would do Bet­ter With­out
Look­ing Back Down the Moun­tain
Writ­ing is Like Floss­ing

Ques­tions? Com­ments? Want a future arti­cle to go into more detail? Mail me through our con­tact form. Just be sure to pick the right top­ic from the drop down menu, and check the archives—particularly the F.A.Q.—to see if your ques­tion has been asked before.

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