metaphoric

[note 2.7]

Friends,

Here’s a passage from Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences About Writing (one of my favorite books on the craft of writing):

A true metaphor is a swift and violent twisting of language, renaming of the already named.

It’s meant to expire in a sudden flash of light and to reveal—in that burst of illumination—

A correspondence that must be literally accurate.
Any give in the metaphor, any indeterminacy,
And it becomes a cloud of smoke, not a flash of light.

Like any rhetorical device, the less you use it, the more effective it is.

~~~

Here’s a passage from the book I’ve been working on:

As a teenager I painted my ceiling blue—it was like sleeping under the sky, or at the bottom of the ocean. I come from a town where we build our houses too close to the ocean—Scituate (pronounced sit-CHOO-it), from the Wampanoag word satuit, meaning cold brook. As a child I lived on Brook Street, the same brook that gave the town its name. The brook ran behind the firehouse across the street from our house and emptied into the harbor, right behind the bank my mother worked in. A huge anchor was mounted on a cement slab in front of the bank—a metaphor for how secure our money would be, but everyone knew the anchor had been salvaged from a shipwreck. At night I’d leave my window open to let the salt air wash over me. It was all around us, but we couldn’t see it. The salt, I mean, each crystal, refracting the sun.

You likely picked up on the use of metaphor in the above: A blue ceiling is like sleeping at the bottom of the ocean; an anchor suggests how safe our money will be (even if salvaged from a shipwreck, which, like us, lives at the bottom of the ocean).

My hope is that this small scene reflects some of Klinkenborg’s maxims.

[note: I’ve updated my upcoming events on my website]