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Here’s H.G. Wells describing time travel, which, in pure plot terms, could have been condensed to “he went into the future.”
I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time travelling. They are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly like that one has upon a switchback—of a helpless headlong motion! I felt the same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminent smash. As I put on pace, night followed day like the flapping of a black wing. The dim suggestion of the laboratory seemed presently to fall away from me, and I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping it every minute, and every minute marking a day. I supposed the laboratory had been destroyed and I had come into the open air. I had a dim impression of scaffolding, but I was already going too fast to be conscious of any moving things. The slowest snail that ever crawled dashed by too fast for me. The twinkling succession of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye. Then, in the intermittent darknesses, I saw the moon spinning swiftly through her quarters from new to full, and had a faint glimpse of the circling stars. Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness; the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous color like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space; the moon a fainter fluctuating band; and I could see nothing of the stars, save now and then a brighter circle flickering in the blue.
And while there’s excellent prose in non-fiction, it’s easier to find great language in fiction. Here is a passage from E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web:
Life in the barn was very good—night and day, winter and summer, spring and fall, dull days and bright days. It was the best place to be, thought Wilbur, this warm delicious cellar, with the garrulous geese, the changing seasons, the heat of the sun, the passage of swallows, the nearness of rats, the sameness of sheep, the love of spiders, the smell of manure, and the glory of everything.
The rhythm is seductive, and I’m floored by “the sameness of sheep.” What an intoxicating phrase.
Novels also can evoke scenes, moods … entire world. Here’s F. Scott. Fitzgerald’s famous passage about a downtrodden village:
About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes–a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight.
What are some elegant ways to describe or show human movement?
While writing I struggle to describe or show athletes or musicians without resorting to cliches or generalizations. I’m looking for good ways to describe the physical movement of say, a batter swinging a bat or a drummer playing a good beat.
He savaged the drums.
He struck the ball with the force of a red-hot hammer striking an anvil.
His hands flew from the base drum, to the snare drum, to the cymbals. It was impossibly fast, as if he was running from New York to San Francisco and back in the blink of an eye.
I know he hit the ball, because I saw it approach him, I saw him tense, and, a moment later, I saw the ball rocketing away from him. He must have made his move between units of time.
What do “good” metaphors or similes capture? In writing, the use of figurative language can elevate a so-so piece to writing to something memorable. What are the differences between good and bad metaphors and similes? This question previously had details. They are now in a comment. Profile photo for Marcus Geduld Marcus Geduld , Published author, lifelong reader. Answered Jun 19, 2012 · Upvoted by Sheri Fresonke Harper , Sheri started writing poetry 20 years ago and started taking courses through the University of Washington Ext… Originally Answered: What makes certain metaphors so good? As a writer, your number-one job is to transfer something from your bain to the reader’s brain. (Your number two job is to help the reader build new thoughts on top of whatever you transferred into his brain.) The item you transfer might be an idea, an image or a feeling. If it’s an idea, you want the reader to understand it clearly; if it’s an image, you want him to see it. (Or hear it, smell it, etc.) If it’s a feeling, you want him to feel it.
With every word and sentence, you should ask yourself, “Am I employing the best tools at my disposal to transfer this idea, image or feeling into the reader’s brain?” Am I flying from New York to London in a plane, or am stupidly trying to cross the Atlantic on a unicycle?
Sometimes the most effective data-transfer mechanism is literal description: “an insect crawled out of her eye socket” probably won’t be served by figurative language. It’s plenty vivid as is.
I’m almost finished reading “1Q84,” by Haruki Murakami, who is a master of simple, effective metaphor. He not only knows how to coin them; he is a master of when to use them. Alas, I don’t have the novel in front of me, so I’m going to have to paraphrase, but he wrote something like, “She hung up on him abruptly, as if someone had chopped through the phone cord with an axe.”
What’s brilliant about that is that it really adds something. “She hung up abruptly” doesn’t convey, by itself, the shock Murakami’s protagonist felt.
At least for me, the metaphor was an extremely effective feeling-transfer mechanism. I saw the axe fall, and I heard the chop. And I recalled times when I’d felt like being hung up on was an act of violence.
Marakami could have used description to explain how his hero felt, but that wouldn’t have packed the same visceral punch. With description, I would have understand how the hero felt; the metaphor went one step further, making me feel what the hero felt.
Metaphors shouldn’t be just to be.
Good metaphors make prose more sensual. They – pardon my French – fuck the reader. They also kick him, sprinkle salt on his tongue, blast a trumpet in his ear, waft vanilla extract into his nostrils, and make visions of sugarplums dance in his head.
Good writing is sensual, because we are sensual creatures. If we can’t see it, taste it, touch it, hear it, smell it, fuck it, fear it, or fight it, we can’t understand it.
Often, straightforward descriptions are sensual: “He scratched his ear.” Attempts to bolster such prose with metaphors are comical: “He scratched his ear, like the needle of a photograph scratching an L.P.” Yeah, we got it the first time!
Metaphors are most helpful when the subject or action is abstract or generalized. Education, morality, mathematical functions, and democracy are abstract; fear, hunger, animals, hot-chicks, and musical instruments are generalized.
There are many ways of sensualizing the abstract and the general. For instance, you can flesh out an abstraction by connecting it to concrete details. Democracy is an abstraction, but “Laura standing in a voting booth” is concrete. “Musical instruments” is a generalization, but “oboes and kazoos” are specific. I can’t see ”musical instruments,” but I can see oboes and kazoos. And I can see Laura in the voting booth. Hmm. Does her husband know she’s voting for Romney?
Metaphors are another technique for sensualizing the the abstract and general. Take, for instance, the sentence “Jenny was tired.” It’s a generalized description. It doesn’t make me feel the way Jenny feels. If she’s the protagonist of a story, that’s a barrier. If I don’t feel her weariness, I may not care about her.
Synonyms don’t always help: sleepy, exhausted, knackered… Some may give off a slight whiff of sensually (“weary” does for me), but none of them fuck me with weariness.
I’m sorry to – yet again – be crass, but it’s useful. When I’m writing, I continually ask myself versions of this question: “Am I fucking the reader?” “Am I fucking the reader with weariness?” “Am I fucking the reader with fear?” “Am I fucking the reader with democracy?” If I realize the answer is “No” – if I’m just giving the reader a light pat on the back – I need to beef up the sensuality. (If I was teaching writing to high-school students, I wouldn’t be allowed to say “fucking,” which is too bad. I’d probably substitute “kicking.” Good metaphors should kick the shit out of the reader. Oops! I said “shit.”)
This explains why cliches are bad. In school, I was just told they were bad because they’re bad. No. They’re bad because zero-sensuality plus a cliche equals zero sensuality. “It was raining cats and dogs” is not more sensual than “It was raining.” It doesn’t make me feel wet. My brain is so tried of “it’s raining cats and dogs” it feels nothing when it hears that phrase. “It’s raining cats and dogs” has a small penis.
This also explains why mixed metaphors are bad: they are too confusing to be sensual. “It’s time to step up to the plate and lay your cards on the table.” The problem is that I’m trying to visualize a baseball field and a poker table at the same time. The images muddle each other.
When you write a metaphor, you want to jar the reader into feeling or sensing.
Let’s try that with “Jenny was tired.”
I wish I had a metaphor recipe: stick “Jenny was tired” in the oven, back at 350 degrees for twenty minutes, and out pops the perfect metaphor. Alas, the best I can offer is brainstorming . I know the problem: I am not fucking the reader with tiredness. I know the goal: to make the reader feel Jenny’s exhaustion. I am going to start listing possibilities in my brain or on paper, allowing myself to free-associate.
Two Tips:
1.Don’t censor yourself! Fill up a page with ramblings about being tired. Crack open a thesaurus if necessary. Think about things that tire you. Think about exhausted people or animals that you know. Free-association is vital, because your subconscious brain is smarter than you are, especially when it comes to making connections. Almost every metaphor I’ve ever come up with has been in a Eureka! moment.
2. Don’t try to be artful. Remember, the point isn’t to be original or “poetic”; the point is to make the reader feel something. Some of the best, most sensual, metaphors are really simple. For instance, George Orwell described biting into a rancid sausage this way: “Bombs of filth exploded in his mouth.”
Here are some sentences I came up with, after ten minutes of brain storming:
Jenny was tired. She felt as if she’d hauled a sofa up twelve flights of stairs.
Do we mistake metaphor for reality? This question previously had details. They are now in a comment. Profile photo for Marcus Geduld Marcus Geduld , studied at School of Theatre at Ohio University Updated Mar 12, 2020 I’ll start by urging you to go to a bookstore or library and get Metaphors We Live By: George Lakoff, Mark Johnson.
Our thinking is infused with metaphor, and most of the metaphors we use are so buried, we don’t even notice them, e.g. my use of the word “buried” in this sentence.
Do I actually think of metaphors as being buried? Yes and no. I’m aware, if I give it a moment’s thought, that metaphors are concepts (and utterances). They’re ideas, so they can’t literally be buried like treasure or corpses. And yet, when I’m speaking, I’m not as aware of this fiction as I am that Santa isn’t real. There’s certainly a sense in which I feel that metaphors are actually buried.
(It’s actually a challenge to literalize this. Okay, they’re not buried, so what are they? They are often things we say or imply that aren’t literal, but we’re unaware of this aspect of them. It’s the unawareness that evokes “buried,” because we’re often unaware of stuff that’s got dirt piled on top of it.)
Look at your own writing:
“I’m genuinely curious about the role metaphor plays in nailing down belief/understanding.”
You used two metaphors in that sentence, and I bet you didn’t even think about the fact that you did so while you were writing it. Those metaphors are ingrained in your mind, and you’d have a very hard time communicating without them. When we write, metaphors flow from our fingertips like … well, that’s another metaphor. Nothing actually flows from our fingertips.
“So I wondered if what looked like mere metaphor to me looked like an accurate picture of reality to him.”
Really? You “looked at” a metaphor? Okay, you get the point. But I’d also say that it’s rarely cut-and-dry (to use another metaphor). It’s a mistake to say that we 100% accept our metaphors as real or unreal. When I say “I’m going to go to amazon.com,” I know that I’m not really going anywhere. But, at the same time, I kind of think I am. This is partly because a metaphor isn’t the same thing as a fiction. A metaphor uses the techniques of fiction to explain or think about a truth.
There are certainly specific ideas that person A considers metaphorical while person B considers real, but I doubt that means A has a better understanding of metaphor than B. They just have different ideas about the specific things they’re talking about.
Maybe some people have a better understanding of metaphor than others, but everyone I’ve ever met, even young children, understands the basic idea. The dumbest guy in the world doesn’t think I’m literally walking to amazon.com. And if he knows that I’m not and yet isn’t confused by me saying I’m “going” there, he understands metaphor.
Certainly, some people are better than others at coining surprising and effective metaphors. We call the best of them “poets.”
1) What role does a compelling enough metaphor play in making a human mind “feel” it has gained possession of a true piece of knowledge about the external world?
In general, it allows us to use the sensual to grapple with the abstract. We’re sense-based creatures who have a hard time understanding something we can’t see, touch, taste, smell, or hear. Which is why it’s useful to hear …
Death, that hath suck’d the honey of thy breath, Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty…
Or
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.
Death and the future are abstractions that Shakespeare and Orwell help us grasp by linking them to sensual data.
2) Do all of us do this one level or another? Do some minds have more facility with manipulating metaphor and reality together?
See above. Yes, we all do it. Yes, some people are better than others, e.g. I can’t do it as well as Shakespeare and Orwell.
3) If so, what specific limitations does this mechanism place on inter-personal communication and understanding?
I think it generally helps more than it hurts, but there’s always a trade-off. The negative of metaphorical thinking is that it can trap us in mental ruts. It’s very hard for me to not think I’m going somewhere when I download files from a server (which what I’m literally doing when I “visit” amazon.com, although even that’s not true, because “downloading” is a metaphor). And it’s hard for me to stop thinking of Quora as a location.
When you can’t stop yourself from working within a mental framework, you’re thinking is necessarily going to be limited by the constraints of that framework. Metaphor is just one of many such constraints that make it difficult to … to use a well-known metaphor … think outside the box.
23 March 2019