Metaphorically Speaking...

Technically speaking, a metaphor is a comparison made without using like or as -- for example, instead of saying as red as blood (which would be a simile) you say blood red. As descriptive techniques go, a metaphor is more turbo-charged than  an adjective because it requires the reader to make imaginative connections inside their heads.  Instead of using a phrase like, her blue eyes widened, which is fairly straightforward, you could say something like her dragonfly eyes flickered blue which would set up associations for the reader and fire up their imagination.

As it says on many medicine bottles DO NOT EXCEED THE PRESCRIBED DOSE, as your writing will become overwrought and indigestible if you do, but used sparingly, it will start to sparkle.

Try writing a list of twenty metaphors and then take the one you like the best and extend it into a paragraph.

Going with the Grain

 On our recent travels my eye was caught by a small carving of a face on a mediaeval building in a Burgundy backwater.

The colour is visible, in spite of all the years which have passed, and the features and character are clearly discernible.  What I like about it is the way that the grain of the wood has become part of the image -- the texture of the painting is an integral part of the face.

It's a bit like that with writing: the texture of the words you choose - some guttural, some sibilant, some long, some short - plays a vital part in how your work will be experienced.  As Margaret Atwood once said, "Every poem has a texture of sound which is at least as important as the argument," but I think the same is equally true of good prose as well.

To put this to the test, write a poem or a piece of prose in which you concentrate on the texture and sound of the words that you are using, and how they relate with one another, working to see how  they compliment and contrast with each other.

The Power of Words

It's a literary thought and it's written on a door -- two of the things I like best in all the world.  Roughly translated - very roughly - it means Words are arrows for the Indians, which is a wonderfully vivid metaphor for the power of language, filled with speed and flight and with a little edge to it.  How often is language used as a weapon?  Too often, perhaps, but in terms of fiction, words used aggressively, freighted with ungovernable emotion, are words that register and hit home.

To help you explore how this may work in your own writing, have a go at something that is combatative, rousing and intense -- something which allows you to show  feelings running high: it could be a piece of polemic, as learning to put across an argument while retaining a sense of passion will help you in structuring longer pieces of writing, or it could be a piece of fiction.  Whatever you choose, throw yourself into it -- it doesn't matter if it's messy, you can address that later.  Be untrammelled; don't hold back.

Hitting the Timeshift Key

When I'm writing, I find structure one of the hardest things to tackle.  Stories, situations and characters, and the language with which to describe them, come to me reasonably easily -- but structure!  I think I'm with David Lodge, when he says in his excellent book The Art of Fiction that we should avoid, "presenting life is just one dam thing after another," a trap that it is easy to fall into if you are writing a linear narrative, but in my bid to avoid this trap I find myself turning what I have written inside out, upside down, back to front and often it still doesn't feel quite right.

Lodge's solution is to use time shifts because he says that this, "allows us to make connections of causality and irony between widely separated events." This makes sense to me, as a story that has a strong thematic resonance can be more engrossing because you have to work a little bit harder to make the necessary connections.

Sooo, if you want to open a new door, creatively speaking (and because I just can't resist another picture)

have a go at writing something that moves about in time.  This will give you the opportunity to experiment with devices such as who knows what information when and the effects that that might have, and to see what happens when  cause and effect are separated by several decades -- does that make events more potent or less so?

A Green-Eyed Monster Moment

I think that sometimes there's an intersection between character and strong emotion which can seriously enhance the way that you plot your novel.  If we are talking mathematical formulas (and remembering that I failed my maths O level twice) it might look something like this:

Character (C) +  Emotion (E) > Plot Thrust (PT)

Although it could probably just as easily be expressed as C + PT > E, but that's probably another story and certainly another post. What I'm trying to get at is the interplay between your character's feelings and their actions, and the excitement and intensity which that can generate for the reader.

To show you what I mean, here is a quotation from Adam Phillips' book Monogamy, always a source for inspirational ideas.  He says, "Suspicion is a philosophy of hope.  It makes us believe that there is something to know and worth knowing...In this sense, sexual jealousy is a form of optimism." In his wonderfully dry way,  Phillips is inviting us to examine the many and varied constituents of sexual jealousy, always a ripe theme for fiction. A character in the grip of a strong emotion can behave in intensely dramatic ways, which can only be a benefit in terms of sending your plot veering off in unexpected directions, which in turn helps to maintain narrative tension.

Suspicion is sometimes the impulse that makes you want to look through the keyhole of a closed door. This one would be perfect for a bit of Italian Renaissance-style skulduggery...

If you are looking for inspiration of the darker kind on this sunny day, why not write a short story which has sexual jealousy and suspicion as its main engine, and see to what extremes it can take you....

Digging Deep for Symbols

On our recent trip to France, we rounded a bend in the canal, those winding curves sinuous with promise, and were confronted with          

- this!

The French waterways board were doing maintenance work, dredging up mud from the bottom and we had to doodle around a bit until they could pull over and let us pass. Without being too clunky about it, it seemed to me to be a perfect symbol of the industrial-style digging you sometimes need to do when you are working on an idea for a story: you have to dredge down deep inside yourself, and most importantly, you have to keep on doing it, until you have excavated enough material to work with.

As symbolism is my theme for this morning, perhaps I should explain that it means using an object or an image - see above! - that works as an expression of something underlying, that has an additional resonance. Using symbols (sparingly, as with all things creative) can be an excellent way of underscoring the importance of a moment, or of giving it some extra spin.  You will make your reader work  harder to glean the full significance of what you are depicting and your narrative will gain in depth. 

If you want to try this out for yourself, try writing a story or a poem that has something symbolic at its heart...

Lost for Words?

I saw this on a wall in Charite sur Loire.  I think it roughly translates as a word separates and repairs; it signifies a loss and a return (with apologies to Patrick Granville).  Apart from being such a lovely thing to find on a wall -- so much better than No Turning or Garage in Constant Use - and sounding so poetic, I like it because it got me thinking about what I expect and want from words, both as a writer and a reader.

Perhaps words separate in the sense that they isolate meaning - as a writer, choosing the exact one is essential -- English being such a rich language the scope for  nuance is almost endless, so you need to be sure that the word you choose conveys precisely what you want it to and arriving at the right one can often take many drafts. And they repair -- Oh, how they repair -- because a beautiful phrase, an assembly of well-crafted words, consoles and uplifts and explains; it can reveal your sorrow to you and in doing so help you to overcome it.

A word signifying a loss? Hmm. A word, either written or spoken, is an intimate part of you, a thought, which you give away.  Perhaps every time you speak or write you lose something of yourself -- your mystery, your privacy, your inner self.  Certainly putting the final full stop on a novel feels closer to grief than joy; it's the end of a dream, and I guess handing your book over to somebody else is a bit like letting your child leave home: you want them to go and you want to them to stay with you. But perhaps if you don't lose anything, or give anything away, then you don't create a space for experience to fill.

Writing maybe an ambiguous experience, but reading! There is no debate about the return from a truly delicious read, and as for loss?  Who hasn't had the experience of losing themself in a good book...

Be Controversial

I've had a line from one of James Fenton's poems kicking around in my head for ages now: Every victim is an accomplice.  It's such a chilling thought - that in a way we collude in our own misfortunes, and I am sure that some who have been subject to domestic violence might take issue with what Fenton is saying. 

However, in creative writing terms, I think it has mileage. It is an intriguing and unsettling notion, and if your reader is intrigued and unsettled, then they are engaging intensely with what you are writing. If it makes them (and you) look at something in a different way, then in a sense your work as an author is done.  I'm not suggesting that you should be controversial for controversy's sake, as you would end up telling a story that is merely gratuitous, but what I am saying is that you shouldn't be afraid of dark and tricky themes, as working  at the outer reaches of your comfort zone is probably where you will write best. 

As if to prove this point,  Deborah Harvey, in her new collection of poems Communion, (from the sequence Iago) sums up the whole difficult dynamic...

I shall dismantle you and smile

You will not notice how. 

I’ll only hurt you 

as much as you allow.

Perhaps it could be another writing door for you to open?

In Praise of Books (and Deborah Harvey's in Particular)

I've just read Deborah Harvey's luminous book of poetry, Communion.



Actually, I'm being a bit disingenuous here, because Deborah joined a writing class I was teaching in Bristol in the late 1990s and I've had the intense pleasure of reading her work, poem by poem, over many years, although this  hasn't in any way diminished the delight of seeing them published so successfully this month by Indigo Dreams.

She is in thrall to the West Country and the literary geology of Communion fits neatly between Thomas Hardy's Wessex and the Gloucestershire of Laurie Lee - in fact much of her work, with its strong narrative undertow, echoes both of these writers.  She is a teller of stories, her poems are fables of love and loss.

This collection, "a crucible of fleet, elusive dreams," is shot through with the tension between the breakdown of a marriage (Taking the Plunge) and the resilience and importance of the family (Kin).  Deborah's style is voluptuous - I particularly like Nettle Rash, where recollections of cooking junkett conjure, "moon daisies, drowsy peonies, / a windfall of laughter and stories / in apple-deep shadows, / licking fingers, / clotted with raspberries / and bottled cream, / and later / you, tracing the nettle rash / staining the milkiness of my skin, / in the treacherous depths /of our thicket bed, / our lips stung with kisses, /our quickening breath."

Much of her inspiration comes from Devon folklore and beyond that from classical mythology, but she wears her  erudition lightly and her reworking of ancient legends is accessible and sparks with dry humour -  many of them, Meditation on a Bristol Tomb in particular, left me with, "a smile too wide to jump". 

The past and its connection to the present can sometimes seem opaque, but Deborah's writing is translucent: it sheds light astringently; examining the relationship between cause and effect, between then and now, and her own particular alchemy is that she can turn history into something that more resembles memory, something private and personal, creating in the process poems that are difficult to forget.