CHAPTER SIX

Figurative Language

“What makes us human?” asks Lance Larsen in one of his “Aphorisms for a Lonely Planet.” “Metaphor, the opposable thumb of thought,” he answers, aptly enough, with a metaphor. You’ve likely encountered the term metaphor in an English class at some point in your life, and you may recall that a metaphor is a comparison of two different things, using the terms of one of those things to understand the other. In the example above, Larsen shows how, just like the opposable thumb, other animals don’t have the benefit of thinking metaphorically, which explains to some extent the evolution of human cognition and intelligence. In fact, you could argue that all human language is at its heart metaphorical and therefore fundamental to how we know anything at all. Even if you’re familiar with the concept of the metaphor, you might not have considered how basic it is to the way we think and understand the world around us.

Linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson make this case in their classic 1980 book Metaphors We Live By. They point out some very basic and common metaphors that inform how we live our lives. For instance, time is money. How is time like money? Lakoff and Johnson explain that in our culture, time is considered a limited resource and a valuable commodity. We can therefore waste time, or spend time. We think about saving time or budgeting time. All of these verbs (waste, spend, save, budget) are not literal. They are metaphors. Time is not actually something that can be wasted, spent, saved, or budgeted.

The point here is that metaphor comes naturally to humans. Our cultures create and spread them without our having to think about doing so at all. Metaphor is a completely natural linguistic phenomenon. Artists, however, take advantage of this instinct by creating new metaphors, ones that are not common or familiar. In fact, the fundamental metaphors of our culture like time is money have already slipped into cliche and are less likely to be helpful to a creative writer. Recall my earlier idea about the function of art helping us to see the world anew. That’s what a fresh metaphor can do: show us a connection or likeness between two things that no one has ever noticed before, possibly revealing some truth about reality itself—or at least our perception of it. An original, artful metaphor can astonish your reader.  

Closely related to metaphor is simile, which is also a comparison between two things. The main difference is that a simile lays bare the comparison by including the word like or as. The effects, however, are somewhat different. That is, a metaphor integrates the reality of the comparison into the language itself whereas a simile remains indirect, relying on language to hold the comparison at arm’s length. One is not better or more useful than the other, but in my experience metaphors can be more transformative and therefore more difficult to render. The simile is only a matter of placing two things that share a characteristic next to one another and tucking the word like or as into the phrase. The metaphor asserts while the simile suggests. Even so, as you develop your own figurative language, you will need to decide what effect you’d like to have on your reader. Sometimes a quick simile is enough to give your reader a sense of what you want to communicate. As always, you will need to let context determine what kind of figurative language works best in your writing.

Finally, as opposed to metaphor and simile, both of which compare two different things, directly or indirectly, a symbol is a concrete image that stands in for a larger idea. Like metaphor, symbolism is also a very natural human invention. You are already familiar with many traditional symbols. Why is it so that you know immediately what the following birds represent: the dove, the owl, the eagle, the raven. You didn’t have to think too hard to come up with peace, wisdom, freedom, and death. Like metaphors, symbols are also culture-bound. Doves represent peace in the Abrahamic religions but not in Buddhism. The eagle clearly represents freedom in the United States but not necessarily in Mexico. The symbols you may want to develop will need to diverge from these familiar cultural images, but they will be specific to the context you create in your writing. A rose does not have to represent love in your essay. Similar to metaphor, a symbol can be challenging to create because it is deeply integrated into your writing rather than indirectly suggestive of meaning as similes are. The actual significance of a symbol often remains unstated, allowing your reader to come to their own understanding of what is being represented. Don’t get too caught up in trying to cobble together a rich symbol in your writing. I would argue that the best literary symbolism is discovered rather than imposed. The key is to be alert to the objects, the things, the stuff you observe in your writing, asking yourself if and how they carry deeper meanings. Symbols conjure the the old verities and truths of the heart, the big ideas and experiences of the human condition. They are powerful precisely because we imbue them with this magic.

Let’s look at some examples of figurative language in context. Maya Kapoor’s “Memory Snags” announces its symbolism in its very title, demonstrating how the juniper snags in Arizona are more than just dead trees. Kapoor employs both metaphor and simile as she develops the snags as a symbol: “The alligator juniper grew thick, stretching perhaps twenty feet tall. Its bark scaled like the skin of an old reptile.” It’s not a huge leap to conceptualize the bark of a tree as the skin of an animal, but the comparison deepens as the essay continues: “Its gray surface, which appeared knobbed and cracked from far away, is finely grooved all over in thin repeating lines and delicate swirls like fingertips.” The skin is rendered more specifically as the image appeals to our sense of sight while inviting us to imagine touching the tree with our own fingertips. Eventually, the snags are presented metaphorically: “In the Santa Catalinas, memory snags gather time in their broken fingers for me to see.” From skin, to fingertips, to fingers, the image of these dead trees accrue more significance as we continue reading until we understand more clearly their profound symbolic meaning at the end:

But I search for the standing dead on which to snag my memory, to tack the truth in place. Standing dead alligator junipers in the Santa Catalina Mountains help me keep track of a quickly changing world. They are the stories that I wish I knew better, that I wish I knew better how to tell—about climate change; about what’s happened and what’s coming next; about cause and effect; tree and sky; memory and mountain; time and place. I don’t want to look away.

The trees have become ghostly relics of the past, markers of climate change, uneasy reminders of our limited human understanding of the world around us. Remarkably, Kapoor achieves this depth in her writing in only two pages.

Another brief essay that develops striking, multifaceted images through figurative language is “Skinwalk,” in which Brooke Wonders remembers the body of her dead ex-boyfriend, much of which, as the title suggests, focuses on skin:

Us freshly scrubbed, me lying next to him, breathing near his neck, his skin smelled like

the wind that whirled past my face when we went mountain biking together—evergreen forest, mountain air, neurotic clean living.

In this case, the comparison collapses time, transporting the reader into a quick image that suggests a previous scene. Inspired by the mythology of the Native American skinwalker, the essay culminates in a complex figure in which the symbolic meaning of skin goes both ways: “Our memories wear us, and we wear them, brittle and transparent as onionskin.” Skin carries the past, through scars and tattoos, but the past can also possess us, haunt us, wear our skin.

Figurative language doesn’t always have to lead to larger symbolism. Sometimes, writers use similes or metaphors as a means of characterization, as this metaphor from Lee Ann Roripaugh’s “Notes on Beauty”: “Your mother wants a peacock, not a defective pigeon.” We get a sense of both the narrator and her mother, whose cruel treatment is demonstrated throughout the essay: “Finally, she will sometimes throw a few pieces of food into the back seat at you, as if you were a dog.” Roripaugh doesn’t dwell on either of these comparisons (pigeon, dog), but each instance helps us understand this relationship. Eventually, a more complex figure emerges:

You wear your social armor as a shell to avoid mollusk-without-a-shelliness. As a kind of prosthetic to insure basic functionality. A smooth, protective shellac to keep woundedness from the open air. A smooth, protective shellac to keep out bacteria, grit, and dirt from what’s raw.

The mollusk metaphor neatly captures the writer’s need to protect herself after suffering the harsh judgment from her mother over time. Figurative language is also an effective way to establish tone, as in Matthew Oglesby’s “A Quiet Procedure,” which opens on a “sickly and diseased” image: “Latticework peeled away to reveal the gray gaps of crawlspaces like missing teeth.” Everything in the Colony is in disrepair: “Wind whistled in the cracked walls and broken windows where tattered curtains hung like ghosts.” The overall effect is eerie. It’s not surprising that Oglesby uses haunted imagery more than once, calling the place a “ghost town,” and imagining the old superintendent “standing in a window like a ghost in repose.”

Finally, let’s take a look at some examples of personification, which occurs when you attribute human qualities to a non-human entity. Personification is inherently metaphorical because it compares non-humans to humans, as in Brandon Schrand’s “The End of Something”: “Every now and then, however, when the breeze blew just so, the scent of fishrot would steal up like the briefest of phantoms and rob me of my breath.” In this case, the breeze is being compared to a something that can “steal up,” as though it had human-like intentions. In “Confluence,” Taylor Brorby similarly personifies rivers: “If you lie down at the Confluence, silt your belly, legs, and arms, push yourself out to the point like a turtle and submerge your head, you can hear the Yellowstone speak in one ear and the Missouri whisper in the other.” These rivers are not actually, speaking, of course, but the metaphor allows Brorby to expand the image of the confluence into a more complex symbol of our human instinct for storytelling, which then “serves as the best framework to understand myself.”

Here’s a tip: notice how all of these instances of personification rely on verbs to carry most of the comparison: steal up, speak, whisper, wear. We might assume that figurative language is all about the nouns, like the breeze or a river, because those are the things we are comparing. Instead, some of the richest personification (and metaphors in general) are a function of elegantly chosen verbs. Verbs naturally carry meanings from certain domains whose metaphorical resonance you can take advantage of.    

Exercise: Metaphorical Thinking

Developing interesting figurative language is not just surface-level ornamentation. If nothing else, I hope this chapter has convinced you that it goes much deeper than that. When metaphors, similes, or symbols appear in your writing, they should derive from some truth about how you perceive the world around you. Like all good art, figurative language itself has the capacity to reveal something we hadn’t realized or understood before. To that end, this playful exercise is meant to jog your thinking a little so that you’re not thinking too logically.

Make a list of ten concrete nouns, no abstractions. The nouns should be things in the world that have physical properties. Try to include a variety of nouns from different domains. Don’t list ten fruits. Now make a separate list of ten active verbs, again no abstractions. The verbs should indicate actions that we can observe in the physical world. Finally, make another separate list of prepositional phrases. Don’t think too hard about doing this exercise right. You can always revise later if needed. Now, select a body part (hand, heart, head, arms, legs, back, foot, ear, tongue) and mix and match words to create sentences from the list of nouns, verbs, and prepositional phrases:

My (body part) is a (noun) that (verb) (prepositional phrase).

Experiment with different combinations, adapt the syntax as needed to create coherent sentences, and try to discover some kernel of truth you hadn’t thought of before. Feel free to add further parts of speech, too. Share your sentences with others and discuss the possibilities for integrating it (or the idea it contains) into a larger piece of writing.