I found Jane Hirshfield’s delicious lesson on The Art of the Metaphor, together with the animation by Ben Pearce, really brought home the immediacy and physicality a metaphor can have. Very inspiring. The door image at the end is fantastic and so evocative that I started writing on the spot. No brilliant metaphors at my fingertips, sadly. But I did find some great metaphors by famous authors here.
Do you think one has to work at creating a terrific metaphor? Or does it arrive on a thunderbolt of inspiration?
Have you tried using a metaphor – for example, one from the link above – as a prompt for a writing exercise? How about Bob Dylan’s “Chaos is a friend of mine”? Imagine yourself arm in arm or drinking beer or on a road trip with your friend Chaos, I mean Charles, or setting him up with a date, or waiting for him to turn up at your wedding as best man…
Thanks for sharing this. I am working on a little workshop session on metaphor, and Hirshfield’s short film got to the heart of things in a beautiful way.
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Glad it helped. Strangely enough, the email that came into my inbox right after yours was about metaphor as well! Synchronicity – you have to love it! https://mailchi.mp/pshares/writing-and-reading-metaphors?e=04e61cf111
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