Recently I taught James Baldwin’s classic “Sonny’s Blues,” which is a story I hadn’t reread since I was in college about twenty years ago. Despite not rereading it (until now), I’ve always remembered the opening of the story in which the narrator reads about his brother—whom he’s fallen out of touch with—being arrested in the newspaper and walks around with this dark feeling inside him:
A great block of ice got settled in my belly and kept melting there slowly all day long, while I taught my classes algebra. It was a special kind of ice. It kept melting, sending trickles of ice water all up and down my veins, but it never got less. Sometimes it hardened and seemed to expand until I felt my guts were going to come spilling out or that I was going to choke or scream.
It’s such a beautiful and powerful image that helps express the complex feelings of the narrator. It also renders something general—we’ve all felt awful before—specific through language. This ice metaphor is strange and striking, as great literature tends to be, but also comprehensible.
This brings me to my old-man-yells-at-cloud topic for today: Please, make your metaphors make sense!
Sometimes I wonder if a lot of writers treat metaphors as just a vehicle for vibes. Rather than making an abstraction more evocative through a specific visual image, modern metaphors are often lyrical language that doesn’t quite mean anything. A lot of modern fiction—across genres—seems to be filled with lines like “he had a mind that minced existence into binaries” or “joy pirouetted across her face” or “his smile was a sharpened dagger dipped in poison” or “at the sound, her soul rippled with fear.” These offer sonic pleasures and a sense of mood, perhaps. But the actual metaphor doesn’t work if you stop to think about it.
The above examples are made up but similar to lines in recent books I’ve read. To pick a real example of an author famous and rich enough to rag on a little bit, here’s a Brandon Sanderson passage that was highlighted by his fans as specifically excellent prose during the recent Sanderson discourse:
The monsters almost seemed to blend and shift together, one enormous dark force of howling, miasmic hatred as thick as the air—which seemed to hold in the heat and the humidity, like a merchant hoarding fine rugs.
To me this is prose as pure vibes. Why is miasmic italicized? Why is miasma (a thick atmosphere or cloud) compared redundantly to thick air? And why is the metaphorical merchant “hoarding” rugs instead of, you know, selling them as merchants tend to do? The problem isn’t a mere gotcha about how merchants operate, it’s that it’s unclear what is actually trying to be conveyed. If the ball of monsters is “hoarding” the heat and humidity, does that mean everything else is dry and arid? But then why is the air described as thick?
Look, I have nothing against vibey prose. I devour hardboiled fiction, which would be nothing without vibey metaphors. And perhaps even calling the prose I’m critiquing vibes-based is incorrect as often the vibes are clashing. (Does the image of a merchant with rugs really fit with the dark, foreboding atmosphere that’s being summoned?) I’d only like to argue that our metaphors can work as both as lyrical flourishes and as actual metaphors. They can both make coherent sense and get across atmosphere or reinforce themes. Our metaphors can do it all, if we put in a little work.
When I think about metaphors, I always think of Orwell’s excellent essay “Politics and the English Language” where he argues “a newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image.” I think of this essay because it was the first time I actually saw someone explain what was wrong with clichés. Sure, clichés are lazy. But Orwell makes a more specific point that cliché metaphors cease to function as metaphors because they no longer evoke their images. Think of how often you hear a phrase like “threw his teammates under the bus” or “has an ax to grind” or “Achilles’ heel” or what not. Do you actually see LeBron James or whoever tossing teammates under an oncoming Greyhound? Do you see a grinding ax or an image of a Greek warrior’s foot? When metaphors are overused, we stop seeing them.
The vibe-based metaphor is the same problem from the other end. We don’t see the image because the image either isn’t there or isn’t coherent. And so the metaphor similarly fails at the fundamental goal of aiding our understanding.
I would make a slight tweak to Orwell’s definition and say that metaphors can work by evoking sensory details that aren’t visual. Though typically a visual image is involved. But in any event, the sensory details should track correctly, working both individually in the evoked idea and in conjunction with the initial object.
So what are some ways to make your metaphors work?
First, pick the right verbs and nouns. A lot of vibes-based metaphors fall apart because the author is prioritizing sonics over meaning. “His mind minced existence into binaries” might work (at least somewhat) as “cleaved existence into binaries” since cleaving implies splitting in two while mincing means chopping into countless small pieces. If the alliteration is important, rephrase. In the Sanderson example, I wonder if “a merchant pushing his wares” wouldn’t make more sense as the characters presumably are feeling the heat and humidity pressed upon them.
Second, don’t compare abstraction to abstraction. Metaphors tend to work best as concrete images, but if they’re going to be abstractions then the initial object should at least be concrete. A line like “her soul rippled with fear” isn’t giving the reader anything visual to imagine.
Third, think about whether the metaphor makes sense in conjunction with the initial object. It’s possible to imagine “joy pirouetting,” I suppose, but hard to imagine what it means for joy to pirouette across a face. Does a sense of happiness just move around the face? Describing a character’s smile as “a sharpened dagger dipped in poison” perhaps conveys the character’s threat, but also conjures a pretty oddly shaped dagger and the unintentionally comic image of the character drooling.
Of course there are lots of other metaphorical traps, including the much discussed mixed metaphor in which multiple contradictory images are combined:
I’m not saying that having metaphors make sense is the only goal. Metaphors can do quite a lot in fiction. They can help worldbuild, establish character or voice, affix the setting, reinforce the supernatural or strange, etc. I especially love when authors strengthen themes across multiple metaphors. E.g., if a story is about the bestial nature of humanity, maybe there’s lots of animal metaphors.
But all of these secondary goals will only succeed if the metaphors get past the first hurdle: actually making any sense.
If you like this newsletter, consider subscribing or checking out my recent science fiction novel The Body Scout that The New York Times called “Timeless and original…a wild ride, sad and funny, surreal and intelligent.”
Other works I’ve written or co-edited include Upright Beasts (my story collection), Tiny Nightmares (an anthology of horror fiction), and Tiny Crimes (an anthology of crime fiction).
This is a fantastic point. Abstraction is meant to enrich experience, not hollow it out. There are great examples here of both in action.
I would argue that mixed or "errant" metaphors have a place, mostly to convey the kind of frantic, scrambling feeling that thinking under pressure often produces. Too often though, they convey a mind slowing down far more than is appropriate to the situation, trying to be poetic. (I think the biggest problem with the Sanderson example is, as noted, that the merchant metaphor just does not fit the stakes of the situation.)
But if you have a character frantically clamoring for sense, I think a bunch of "bad" metaphors can actually work really well in that situation.
Excellent.
Gawd, I hope a lot of newbie writers read this.
The Baldwin paragraph is brill.
Thank you.