The lovers' feelings waned to a mere crescent. The New Mexico sky is a rich harvest of stars.Įvening brings a harvest of lovers to the beach. ![]() Try playing in the key of moon stars, harvest, lovers, crescent, astronauts, calendar, tide. Wheaties plug your morning into a socket.Ī socket holds back tides of electricity. This army is the Wheaties of our revolution. Muhammad Ali avalanched over his opponents. 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.Īll 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. This is a way of creating collisions between elements that have at least some things in common - a fertile ground for metaphor. ![]() This is "playing in the key of tide," where tide is the fundamental tone. For example, here are some random words that are diatonic to (in the same key as) tide ocean, moon, recede, power, beach. Like musical notes, words can group together in close relationships like belonging to the same key. Here are some exercises to train your vision to help you learn to look in the hot places to help you nurture a spark that can erupt into something bright and wonderful. But even if great metaphors come from inspiration, you can certainly prepare yourself for their flaring. 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. Hours are links of a chain, accumulating weight and bending the old man's back lower and lower as each new hour is added. "A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed / One too like thee." Look at this metaphor from Shelley's, " Ode to the West Wind": Most of us have the creative spark to make metaphors, we just need to train and direct our energy properly. Verbal Metaphor - formed by conflict between the verb and its subject and/or object (e.g., clouds sail he tortured his clutch frost gobbles summer down).Īristotle says that the ability to see one thing as another is the only truly creative human act. Friction within these relationships create metaphor (e.g., hasty clouds, or to sing blindly). Qualifying Metaphor - Adjectives qualify nouns adverbs qualify verbs. You might even extend them into longer versions (e.g., clouds are sailing ships on rivers of wind). Now come up with a few of your own and run them through all three forms. ![]() Run each of these through all three forms, There are three types of metaphor:Įxpressed Identity - asserts an identity between two nouns (e.g., fear is a shadow a cloud is a sailing ship). Put things that don't belong together in the same room, and watch the friction: dog with wind torture with car cloud with river. If the things we identify are the same, e.g., a house is a dwelling place,there is no metaphor, only definition. The army disappears and we are left to face something red-eyed and dangerous. We watch the soldiers begin to snarl, grow snouts, and foam at the teeth. It jams them together and leaves us to struggle with the consequences, for example: an army is a rabid wolf. In its most basic form, metaphor is a collision between ideas that don't belong together. 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 shadows" (Steely Dan), metaphors support lyrics like bones. Unfortunately, metaphors are a mainstay of good lyric writing, indeed, of most creative writing. They are difficult to find and difficult to use well.
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