I love metaphors. I delight in creating them so that they fit exactly into their context and paint a picture for the reader.
I recently ran a workshop for my local writers’ group, Anderida Writers, on the minting of new metaphors. We looked at a bunch of tired metaphors and similes, the clichés we all strive not to use. We discussed why many old metaphors are so seductive. Why they roll off the tongue (ouch, can you believe I’ve just stumbled into a cliché? Of course you can).
And then we looked at some of the great modern metaphors in literary fiction and in genre fiction. Metaphors by Sebastian Barry, Michael Ondaatje, P.G. Wodehouse, Raymond Chandler and others were chewed over. We considered how writers mint fresh metaphors that are totally in keeping with their context. Then we wrote our own. It was great fun coming up with metaphors for crime, fantasy, romance, humour as well as literary fiction. Like cracking open that bottle of fizz after a lottery win. No, that’s too much. Let’s try … like stoking an open fire and hearing the crackle of seasoned timber.