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