Metaphor: What Makes It Work
On the darling of literary devices and the three essentials to do it well
Welcome to Slant Letter’s spring seasonal intensive! Become a paid subscriber to join our close reading of Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful for an editor’s annotated insights on an extraordinary memoir that all writers can learn from. Here’s what we’ve covered so far and what’s next. Join us!
1. The Art of the Caveat
2 . Details that Tell, Details that Move
3. Writing about Writing: The Thrills and the Trade-offs
4. Metaphor: What Makes It Work
5. The Power of Wordplay: A Case Study
6. “Stetting the Tears”: Writing About Pain
7. “The Flickering Is Yours”: Final Thoughts
“How I picture it: A scar tells a story, a very short story about pain, injury, healing—what so much great literature is about. A scar is concise communication.” -
A metaphor, it might be said, is concise communication. It is an icon—something we can see acting as portal to something we cannot. The metaphor is one of the great darlings of literary devices, but at its heart, it’s a kind of magic—a crafted comparison of two unlike things that leads into discovery.
It’s what so much great literature is about.
Like a scar, a metaphor says: this is the site where something happened, and it’s quite a story. As Smith tells hers:
“The long pink line where my daughter left my body, then my son, tells a story. A door opened, then shut, then opened and shut again. But I have stood ajar since the moment I became a mother.”
Today, we’re continuing our close reading of Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful with a study of metaphor. Metaphor can be a mixed bag—if overdone, it becomes cliché. If underdeveloped, it’s confusing. Mixed metaphors dizzy the brain. And metaphors that are not created mindfully risk alienating readers, when something is held up as mere word picture that is, to the reader, no distant analogy but immediate lived experience (such as casual metaphors of gun violence, illness, or disability).
Let’s begin with the three essentials that make metaphor work: