Words With Impact: Discover Metaphoric Threads

Workshop: Discover Words That Sing

“Thresholds are necessary in the creative process in giving an idea somewhere to go.” Tim Wynne-Jones

Change, no matter how small, can create mental and emotional chaos as you turn into a different direction, physically or emotionally. To cross a threshold though requires a choice, even if it has been forced upon you like a refugee fleeing his war torn land. All sensory memory is heightened and sharpened. It is not just the moment that is at stake, but the journey that follows it. Thresholds become part of our soul shadows as much as our physical bodies cast their shadow. And the question can linger. “Did I choose the right fork in the road?”

Metaphors can open several tension points as choices challenging beliefs, values and possibilities, either personally for a main character, or in relationship to family or society.

For example, when we personally cross thresholds we deliberately make a choice to step into new stages, probably never to return: a passage of some moment. It can include walking away from a place, or a relationship, or choosing to no longer be who we were a few minutes earlier. Often that moment of decision become a life metaphor or signpost.

For example, in the novel, The Hero and the Crown, protagonist Aerin made that crossing when she arrived at her first dragon slaying. “Talat halted, and they stood, Aerin gazing into the black hole in the hill. A minute or two went by and she wondered, suddenly, how one got the dragon to pay attention to one in the first place. Did she have to wake it up? Yell? Throw water into the cave at it? Just as her spear point sagged with doubt, the dragon hurtled out of its den and straight at them.”

Despite the moment of hesitation Aerin acted upon all her preparation and stepped into a new role as a dragon-slayer. The threshold changed her life.

Don’t forget though that some of the most powerful metaphors can also be ordinary. For example a tree is often used as a symbol or metaphor of growth and life. In reverse though it can also impact a story by exposing lies and shadows. Fairy tales and folk tales are rich with living images in all forms. Scriptures too remind us that choices spread beyond immediate actions.

“For the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay.” Romans 8: 20-21 NRSV

In the opening of the movie Penelope, as a curse is laid upon the family for their refusal to take responsibility for their actions, the tree in the courtyard falls into immediate decay. Yet it doesn’t die. Instead it remains as a visual image reminding the family descendents and others of the curse. Even if they try to pretend it doesn’t exist, the tree stands in judgment as a silent metaphor.

And it silently raises immediate story questions such as why are women willing to marry into this family? Do they not believe in the curse or do they not care?

So consider too what metaphor warning could your own character not see or acknowledge?  Or what warning does she represent to others? Silent metaphors woven into your setting can speak in volumes.

Action Steps:

1. Put your character into a moment of choice. Overwrite all the sensory details in the initial draft. Then write up the brief scene twice, once for each possible decision: to flee or fight, or to submit the accepted ‘dogma’ either socially or personally.

2. Then choose either a threshold metaphor, or a very ordinary image as a metaphor such as Penelope’s tree.

Share: What word in your brainstorming was the funniest and which was the saddest?

Read deep, marcy

Words With Impact: Discover Metaphoric Threads

Workshop: Discover Words That Sing

“Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.” Edward Debono

Also in the prologue as Kiri feels her mother’s pain, “A great, blinding whiteness filled Kiri’s mind. ‘Mother,’ she whispered. The word sank into silence like a warm stone dropped into snow.  A coldness spread from Kiri’s stomach out to her fingertips.”

The whiteness of the outside winter: the cold, the numbness, the expanse, now internalize in Kiri as fear. Whenever she becomes fearful she feels the whiteness. When she approaches a threshold to cross over, the whiteness comes and she retreats. “Around her an emptiness was opening, drawing her down into its still white heart, down to where she must not go. Something waited for her in that white stillness.” 

After she heals Garen, the whiteness leaves. The internal cold becomes external.  “Shivering with cold, she huddled over the fire. A warmth inside her spread slowly out toward her numb fingers and feet. She knew that Garen’s body would recover.” 

With the third metaphor, the song, Kiri is linked to her past, her present, and her future. The reader is pulled into the atmosphere of Kiri’s life by the songs, which sustain and undergird her. In the prologue when Ana finds Kiri in the tent and begins to coax her to leave she asks if Kiri knows the song. And Kiri remembers her father singing it. And at the edges of her memory other people too. 

Again eight years later she begins with a song as she and Mali sing the sun into the sky. As she and Mali go to heal they each sing, “Wind, hear my song.” When Kiri realizes the Mali has died she joins the wind, “her own voice in the song for the dead.  The storm caught up her words and scattered them across the driving snow.” Next she becomes silent in song until she heals Garen. Then the wolken comes back for her to give her vision, to name her. “Singer to the sun, caller of the wind, your power is your song. I name you Amarra, she who speaks with the wind.”

Because the reader has been able to identify with Kiri all along through the metaphors of within, and whiteness and song we recognize without explanation that she has reached resolution when, “Kiri lifted her arms and began to sing.” We have been brought into her language.

Action Steps:

1.Using the list poem from earlier, repeat the process beginning with either “Fear is a…, or Song is a…,. Or do both.

Share: What feelings for your character surprised you when put into one word?

Read deep, marcy

Words With Impact: Discover Metaphoric Threads

Workshop: Discover Words That Sing

“It’s impossible to teach anyone to write a poem. But we can set up circumstances in which poems are likely to happen. We can create a field in and around us that’s fertile territory for poems. Playing with words, we can get to the place where poems come from. We can write and make discoveries about who we are and who we might become whether or not we truly commit ourselves to becoming poets.” Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge.

A good example of how these metaphoric concepts working across age and culture to enrich emotional resonance and discovery can be found in The Listening Silence, by Phyllis Root. The prologue sets the character, the theme, and the atmosphere for this story through three metaphoric connections: within, the whiteness, and the song. By anchoring these images in the prologue, rather than by introducing them in flashbacks during the narrative, the author sets up reader identification with Kiri immediately, and catches the reader up into the story’s movement without slowing the pace later to offer background explanation.

In the prologue Kiri is a five-year-old left in her tent alone while her mother searches for the missing father during winter. Kiri’s mind drifts until she goes beyond her tent into the korlu where she hears crying. Then from within the korlu, she sees the white snow, the frozen lake, and the trees. Hearing an animal outside the tent, she goes within, hoping to see her parent’s tracks. She goes within her mother when she calls and feels her death.

When the narrative resumes eight years later the reader recognizes that this ability to go within is a part of Kiri’s character. She makes decisions and choices for herself based on her willingness to go within or not. She is willing to go inside animals and nature but resists people. There is too much pain there and her fears stop her. To go within people can bring healing and Kiri struggles with herself to become a ‘Healer’. It is an integral part of her character, but her resistance to who she is sets the conflict. Because of the connection the reader made with Kiri as a five year old, the reader can see and feel and understand along with Kiri as she tries to balance a five-year-old’s understanding with the approach of adulthood.

Her character is one of Healer and she recognizes that in the end. When it matters most she goes past her own personal fears, first to heal a wolken, then Garen, of whom she has always been afraid, and through healing them by going within to meet their needs, she finds her own peace and acceptance of who she is.

 “She could not go within to heal him.  Something waited for her there, something that knew her name. And suddenly there was stillness……..but here, at the center, was a quiet as vast and white as winter.  Here within Garen, beyond that edge of his pain, was the place of healing that Mali had told her about.” The Listening Silence

Action Steps:

1. How might you use the metaphor of “within” to translate to your own character’s emotional core?

2. How can you translate it into a thread metaphor for your story?

Share: What do you see as an integral metaphor as a part of your character?

Read deep, marcy

Words With Impact: Discover Metaphoric Threads

Workshop: Discover Words That Sing

“Metaphor does that. It helps us explain ourselves to ourselves. It helps us explore and examine forces that we cannot otherwise come to terms with.” Jane Yolen

Jane Yolen suggests that the language of metaphor is as natural as breathing in everyday life, “and her sisters—poetry and story” are as well. When she and her family experienced a difficult season she says, “Everything I felt during those dark days, the way I approached mortality, the way I prayed, the way I had to view the world, was in terms of metaphor.”

The movie Green Dragon helps audiences experience that level of force when lives are thrown into upheaval and tragedy, at almost a moment’s notice, and never to be restored as before but can be reconciled. One DVD jacket cover for the movie simply states: “A story from a war that has been forgotten. When Tai arrives at Camp Pendleton, he is confronted by a camp filled with despair.”

 Commissioned to translate for the refugees, Tai forms a friendship across cultures, and begins the healing for himself and his people. Multiple stories intertwine. In one thread, a lonely American cook teaches a young orphan to paint, bringing beauty into the stark surroundings. From devastation, loss, and grief come love, hope, and new beginnings that cross time and barriers. Art, in many forms, becomes the metaphor, which they learn to speak across their dark days, within themselves and across the many cultural/language barriers.

One skill to develop a language that crosses emotional and experiential boundaries, whether cultural, generational, or extraterrestrial, is to become fluent in abstract, especially with metaphoric ability—poet or not.

We can develop this language by looking for ‘poem seeds’ whether we actually write poems or not. We go behind the visible surfaces to find the meanings behind our words, our images and memories.

Action Steps:

Develop Images

List Poems

1. Write a list poem. This works well for non-poets to get past the inner critic and just write for fun. It also helps get us in touch with abstract concepts.

Choose one of the following words: hope, love, faith, trust, beauty and do a cluster brainstorm for it.

2. Now write up your thoughts as a list poem adding whatever new ideas rise to the surface as well. Keep writing the repetition in each line: hope is…, or I believe beauty…, or set up as a question; is love…, or can love be found in a …..?

3. Leave it alone for a day or two then come back. Now go down your list of images. Can you change each line into a metaphor?

For example: hope is ...a waterfall.   / Hope is a waterfall like rushing wind.

                                       / Hope is an hourglass waterfall.

Although you may not end up using the words themselves, the practice will help you connect to the emotion you want your situation to generate, whether in your character’s heart or your reader’s. Being able to identify the emotional flow enables you to write a richer scene.

Share: What word did you choose?

Read deep, marcy

Words With Impact: Discover Metaphoric Threads

Workshop: Discover Words That Sing

“The conscious use of mythic themes and tropes-that is elements and language that reflect either figuratively or literal use of images, symbols and folklore-is the key ingredient, allowing authors to explore realistic themes on a symbolic level.” Julie Bartel

In her book, Dreams and Wishes, Essays on Writing for Children, Susan Cooper makes a comparison between writing and fantasy. “Fantasy is the metaphor through which we discover ourselves. So it is for the writer, too. Every book is a voyage of discovery.  … The work begins with a deep breath and a blindly trusting step into the unknown.”

This sense of anticipation, curiosity and courage that accompanies all beginnings provides a helpful insight into the writing process. Some days we are ready for adventure and some days we are not.

Susan Cooper also states that, “We are all at the mercy of the quality of the imagination we inherit. The book can never be better than that.” And alongside that statement she says that no one can write fantasy on purpose, that like poetry it won’t come on demand. This idea is extremely freeing. If each work is discovery and a new land, then if we don’t respond to our ‘inheritance’, we don’t discover ourselves either, nor discover the symbols that engage us, or those we need to share.

Speaking of poets and writers of fantasy she states that, “Both deal with images, and with their links to and within the unconscious mind.” By doing so as writers they tap into the archetypes of behavior and emotion—variations on the same theme, “until he achieves his goal, his quest. Fantasy, of whatever kind, may seem to be picking you up and carrying you away but in fact it’s taking   you right back home.  All fantasy involves metaphor.”

Action Steps:

1. What is one of the main thoughts in word/image/or emotion that is a crucial thread in your narrative?

2. Whichever you chose make a list of possible connections with the other categories. For example if you choose the word laughter then make a list of how that can translate into images or emotions. Or vice versa.

3. If you have made your list with positive threads now reverse it into negative words and images and emotions.

Share: Were you surprised by any images? Why?

Read deep, marcy

Words With Impact: Discover Metaphoric Threads

Workshop: Discover Words That Sing

“Metaphors are the gate-crashers of the spirituality static quo.” Joy Sawyer

Metaphors are meant to help us see life through a fresh perspective, both verbally and visually. When they tap into theme and character and setting and atmosphere they have the ability to gate-crash through our pre-conceived clichéd views. Even clichés were at one time a fresh perspective—so innovative in fact that they eventually became overused.

And we don’t need to jettison familiar images. In fact metaphors often work better through familiarity but need to be slightly angled. Sometimes the image must loom large in order to crash through numbed thinking. Other times it only needs to be a soft reflection that catches us up enough to pause and take a deeper look.

Waiting For Midnight, by Merrie Destefano, is a brief collection of short stories and flash fiction that highlights the power of image and metaphor and theme in unexpected ways. By altering the anticipated viewpoint character or the setting we step into the story one side up, but come out the other end as if we were in house of mirrors. 

For example, in her flash fiction piece Breathtaking we immediately identify with the character’s desperate struggle to simply take a breath—to fill out the form—to remain calm instead of anxious in the emergency room—to remember. How many other images of trying to simply breathe pass through our imagination as we struggle along with this person wondering what is really causing his anguish. And then the mirror metaphor shifts.

“No. Not poison. My sweat on the floor, my blood, my skin. It was my own

              designer disease, all brand new and deadly—

              And, unfortunately, highly contagious.”

Action Steps:

1.     What was the first thought/word/image/or emotion that struck you?

2.     Take a brief scene from your novel, either in dialogue, or internal monologue, and twist the end into something opposite.

3.     What impact would that have on your character’s situation emotionally, spiritually, or mentally?

4.     Even if you cannot use the shock difference at this moment, is there a way you can introduce the possibility of another outcome?

Share: Did your opposite effect turn into humor or shock?

Read deep, marcy