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Writing Metaphors

The craft of writing has a fixed set of metaphors to nail down the fuzzy concepts. Those mental images are colorful and engaging, and ever so subtly, they shift our perspective. I will try pulling some of them apart and share how I personally see them.


Hook

This uses the image of a fishing hook to describe the opening of a story. Really an odd metaphor. It paints an image of desperation, suggesting you need a trick of sort to bait and catch the reader. Yet, whenever someone starts reading a book, they have a pretty good idea of its content. They have watched the cover, read the blurb, and likely have a solid idea of its genre. All you have to do is deliver. Not that the opening of the story doesn’t require some special consideration, but I see it more as a form of seduction or foreplay, or a car getting into gear.


Writing as a Journey

Writing as a Journey is likely the most fundamental and powerful of all writing metaphors. We have writer’s block, where we get stuck, and suddenly we're not getting anywhere. We have discovery writers. We keep a Writer’s journal like some explorer. We talk about moving forward with our story. Our story has a Point of no return, and the hero has an inner journey.

Here are a few quotes from random writers:

"Just make sure you’re continually moving forward on your own schedule, be that fast or slow."

"If I hit a hard rock where I don't know where to go, and it impedes my ability to continue, I'll backtrack and rewrite."

"Structure applies to both the outer journey of achievement, and the inner journey of transformation. In other words, as the hero moves on the visible path toward that finish line"

"Sometimes, I know the writing isn't any good. Sometimes I feel I'm writing uphill. And it's not right, it's not right. But I keep going, 'cause I know I'm gonna go back and fix it. I can always go back. But you have to just keep going forward."
— R. L. Stine​


Plot

The term is in family with plots of land seen on a map. We even talk about plot points. There’s also the word complot. Thus, despite their obvious advantages, plotting is distanced and cynical, like someone planning their journey on a map, unlike the more intimate journey of discovery writers.


Flowery language

When people think of the term flowery language, what they imagine is pretty much this, from The Timber Pirate (1922):

Night’s sable curtain was soon to fall on the short-lived drama of a Winter day in the Laurentians. The departing sub-arctic sun, in its last pale glory, sent up from the omnipresent whiteness myriads of glistening beams that stabbed the eyes like leaping darts of fire. Of sounds there was oppressive absence. Not even a vagrant breeze sighed in the tree-tops; but at irregular intervals the intense stillness was smitten by the lugubrious “Spon-n-n-n-g!” of some aged tree splitting open to the heart where freezing moisture expanded in its crevices. All life and warmth seemed utterly exterminated in the pre-twilight calm save for the distant Monarch of Day slowly receding from his stark white world of desolation.

The term flowery language suggests something flamboyant, ornamented and posh, something a bit girly, unlike a more manly writing style where the author eliminates needless words, bursting out sharp, clear sentences.

So while a nasty fight scene easily could apply flowery language, the term suggests topics of sunsets, pretty dresses, grand gardens and suchlike. It’s pretty much stuck in a rebellion against literary traditions from the 1920’s.


Dynamic Characters VS Static Characters

In the novel Gerald’s Game,
the protagonist spends the entire story tied up in a bed
. Yet, she is what is called a Dynamic Character. In this understanding of the word, dynamic refers solely to the person's mental development throughout the story, which ironically tends to make them less dynamic in the physical sense.

With a term called Dynamic Character, it’s no surprise that this is widely regarded as the right way of making a character. Yet, the history of literature is rich with stories that naughtily insist on being about something other than the mental change of the protagonist.


Character arc

This one sounds kind of epic and romantic, but don’t be fooled. To visualize the hero’s development over time, it uses the mental image of a coordinate system, with X representing time and Y representing the mental development. Curiously, this 2-dimensional way of seeing the character is said to make them more 3-dimensional.


3-Dimensional character

To illustrate the mental depth of the character, this one uses the plastic form of a statue, as opposed to the flatness of a cardboard figure. The dark side of this metaphor is that it suggests that more realism is always better in fiction; you never hear anyone suggest that a character should be less 3-Dimensional. Yet, a lot of memorable characters have a cardboardish quality, where you can summarize them pretty much in a single sentence. The average joe, the broken veteran, the trickster.


Flat Characters

There’s a lot of confusion about this term. It can either mean the opposite of a 3D character, or it can mean a character with a “flat character arc” (awful term, a “flat arc”) or sometimes it means both, since a lot of people think a character without one of them inner journeys in them must be inferior.


Character Flaw

This one also seeks to understand mental qualities as tactile, physical ones. A flaw is something that isn’t a natural part of the object. If a vase has a flaw, then this isn’t part of what the vase was supposed to be like. If a character is described as flawed, it means that he is more or less broken. The term always rubs me the wrong way. I feel that there is something artificial about it, whereas I mostly see my characters in a more holistic light, where the characters’ less flattering qualities are a natural part of them.


Point of View

This uses the most dominant sense, that of sight, to explain whose perspective we see things from. Of course, the POV character can just as well be blind. This is such a fundamental metaphor that it is hard to imagine any other way of seeing things.


Voice
This simply means "writing style". However, the term voice suggests something highly personal. After all, it is your lungs, throat, tongue and lips that create your voice. Speaking with another person's voice is not physically possible.

Your writing style is personal. Yet, writers build their writing style upon that of others, and productive authors have been known to hire ghostwriters. All artists steal, imitation is the best flattery and all that.
 
I was hoping this was going to be a discussion about how to create metaphors in your writing, bur never mind...

You have some interesting views Kasper. I tend to see things differently for the most part but will limit my responses to just a couple:

Why would you see a hook as negative? Unlike fish, readers like to be hooked. A hook is simply an aspect of your story that engages the reader's curiosity quickly. A revelation that makes the reader think: Aaaah, I see where this is going...this is going to be good. Mind you, I think your seduction idea also works, but seduction has to be slow and subtle unless you're an existing luminary.

"The more intimate journey of discovery writers"? Well for starters you haven't really defined a plot at all. A plot is the carefully timed drip feed of information to the reader which, at each point, adds a new dimension or direction to the story. I call these points "plot kickers" because they suddenly kick the plot along in a new way. They can take all sorts of forms - but will usually be a revelation that wasn't expected that makes the reader see everything in a new light and often means a new challenge, setback, or victory for the MC.

A good plot doesn't have to be planned. I would certainly call myself a planner but there is always discovery between the points and sometimes discovery changes the points because you think of a better one along the way. If the opposite of this is just writing your way through the mists until you discover something, how exactly is that intimate?
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
>writing your way through the mists until you discover something, how exactly is that intimate?
I'll answer this one because I beat Kaspar to it. <g>

I'm a planner. Massive worldbuilding, plot-mining, character arcing. But inevitably I find myself discovery writing at the micro level. A scene could go this way or that, be set here or there, include this character or maybe those. How do I choose? I write the scene, not knowing except in a vague, misty way where I'm headed.

When I'm writing that sort of scene, it's the most intimate act of writing I know. It's analogous to sketching without really knowing what you're after. It's like composing music when all you've got is a mood. The words, the exact words, are mere potentialities floating like motes, or floating like the notes are before you've actually played them. Every other sentence has a surprise within it, even if every third sentence is a disappointment to its parents. The work is down at that level, down on the floor where the gears and made and the bolts get fitted--words, phrases, sentences. It's Word Frogger till I get to the other side and can look back and start to detach. But down in the word mines it's just me and my fingers picking and a tiny headlamp that doesn't show much beyond the next punctuation.

It's intimate for me.

As for the seduction, I don't think you have to be a luminary. The start of Josiah Bancroft's Books of Babel is it plenty slow, but I got on board with the words themselves. And I read his first volume before Orbit even picked him up. The opening just has to appeal, and there's no telling what's going to appeal from one yokel to the next. Granted, a mic-drop will always get attention, and if you've got one by all means use it. But it you don't have one, I think that might be okay too.
 
Skip, I think you and I take a very similar approach and intimacy in writing the way you describe it is fair enough.

But I was responding to the assertion that discovery without planning is intimate. It might be intimate but any two people lost in the fog together will have to be intimate.

As for your point on seduction - existing luminaries like King or Grisham assume consent and take their readers roughly.
 
Just wanna add that I didn't mean to claim that discovery writing is superior. My point was just that plot originated from plots of land seen on a map, and that plotting shares the same distanced overview. For instance, I may easily plot the murder of a loveable character for shock value, but when I have to actually write it, then it's kind of unpleasant because it's a little too close for comfort.

About hooks, I think we're in agreement on what ideas the hook metaphor invokes. The Dark one talks about something which "engages the reader's curiosity quickly", while Skip says a "mic-drop will always get attention".
But hooks are a very specific way of opening a story, and hooks are described as THE way to open a story; we need to hook the reader, right?
But as a reader, I just don't find hooks very engaging. The hookish stuff is things that require a solid build-up. When you lead the story with stuff blowing up, someone getting sucked through a wormhole, and bigass conflicts, I just don't care much. And action prologues are just ... look, I can figure out that those characters are gonna dies anyhow, so just skip to the real story, right?
 

jacksimmons

Scribe
I don't think a 'hook' has to be necessarily charged with action. I don't think that sort of thing really works in writing. When you open with an explosion or a battle or a wormhole on film or TV its engaging because it's a spectacle and it gets your blood pumping. The same isn't really true with a description.

A great hook is the start of 1984. 'It was a bright day in April and the clocks were striking 13'. 13? Straight away you know there is something wrong. No action there, but its brilliantly unsettling and you feel required to read on. That's what the term 'hook the reader' has always meant for me.
 
Admittedly, I'm using the word hook in pretty much the same way! But I'm solely talking about the metaphor here. A hook doesn't really invoke subtlety. Think about other metaphorical hooks, like hooking up with someone, hooked on [whatever drug] or by hook or by crook.
I have read some writing, published and not, where I feel that the hook image was responsible for making the author just a little too desperate, and where I think an image like "First date" or something would have them approach the opening differently.
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
I agree, Kasper. I sometimes think the hook gets invoked so much because it makes for an easy blog post. Although, "first date" would be even more terrifying. <g>
 
A hook doesn't have to be action. As I said before, it's something to engage the reader's curiosity from the outset. For example, in one of my books the MC receives a letter addressed to himself in his own handwriting, sent from a place he'd never been.

In another, the reader knows there is to be a family wedding that afternoon but by page three learns of a plan by a treacherous uncle in league with Vikings to attack the wedding. Ok, that is threatening action but the action isn't the hook, it's the anticipation of a conflagration to massively change the MC's life.
 
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