On Creating Metaphors: A New Approach Through Emotion

Easy way to create metaphors

I've posted many times about my struggles with creating metaphors, often feeling it's almost impossible to craft unique and interesting ones, especially if you don't possess a "God-given talent." Knowing what they are and knowing how to create them are two very different things. I've looked and looked, and there doesn't seem to be a formula or method to reliably generate them.

I made a lot of progress when I experimented with synesthesia. This seemed to kickstart my creative process and truly opened my mind to writing more creative prose. Simply describing one sense using another, when done correctly, can create beautiful and unique prose.

I'm now working on what I consider a new and improved way to approach this. I'm assuming it already has a technical name, but I stumbled upon the technique through trial and error. I call it "using emotions to describe emotions" or "linking metaphors through emotion." Normally, you have an emotion in your head (like love), you try to use words to encode that feeling, the reader reads those words, and hopefully, they decode them into the same feeling in their mind. With my new technique, I skip the descriptive words and use one emotion to describe another emotion so I try to link things by feelings rather than senses. This technique generates random poetic patterns -similes, metaphors, synesthesia, and a host of other things- with almost no effort.

The benefits of using this technique are:

• It's easy. Like, super easy. Prose that might have taken me weeks to perfect, metaphors that would have usually been agonizingly birthed, now just fall out of my head effortlessly.

• It creates a wonderful blend of metaphors, similes, and synesthesia almost automatically.

• It doesn't have the problems that symbolism usually has. If you don't have the key to an author's symbolism, then often the writing looks and sounds nice, but it doesn't really say anything. The point of the writing can get lost. With this technique, the meaning is always clear, no matter how poetic the language becomes.

I suppose an example would be best. These are lyrics to a song I'm working on, and they pretty much just fell out of my head. I'm not saying the lyrics are a masterpiece; I'm just illustrating how, by reversing the creation of metaphors in my head, my writing flowed instead of being agonizingly birthed.

-

I'm the last in line for your attention

All sold before I meet your eyes

I put my arm around your shoulder

And pull your body close to mine

-

So we sit here stranded in the ocean

The sun it shines a silver heat

The grace of shade from better memories

Is something only found in dreams

-

Back in time my mind it starts to wander

When first your eyes slid from the screen

When your wristwatch seemed more interesting

Than any words I have to speak

-

As you can see, the writing is poetic and visual, without the cryptic flavor of symbolism. It clearly depicts two people struggling in their relationship. In the past, I would sit there trying desperately to come up with a metaphor to describe the situation, and I would fail miserably. With this new technique, I reverse it. Instead of trying to think of a metaphor for the situation, I focus on the emotion of the situation and then I try to think of other situations where that emotion is similar. Here's where the magic happens—when you pull imagery from the other scenario, it works automatically to describe the current scenario as long as the emotions of the 2 situations are the same. In a nutshell, don't use senses to connect metaphors; use feelings.

For example:

• I wanted to describe the feeling of being ignored by another person, when that person just doesn't seem to have time for you. Instead of trying to come up with a fancy metaphor for this situation, I just focused on the emotion and then tried to think of another time I felt a similar emotion. Where else have I felt a feeling of waiting, and then getting nothing at the end of it? I immediately thought of queuing up at a store, only for the store to have sold out of everything by the time I got to the front. So, I simply used this emotion to describe the relationship: "last in line for your attention. all sold before I meet your eyes." Everyone knows this feeling, so I used it instead of direct language. This details how the person has time for everyone else, but as soon as you talk to them, there's nothing.

• I wanted to describe sitting next to someone in silence. Instead of focusing on the situation, I focused on the feeling. You are with someone, yet you feel alone. What other situation would generate that same feeling of being alone? Stranded in an ocean. I then added the discomfort of the situation by comparing it to the sun beating down on you. Since the sun was mentioned, I could then compare better memories to the shade, and then say those better memories are so far gone, they are only found in dreams. Once you connect the emotions together, the rest of the metaphor flows.

• I then had the vision of the person you're talking to being bored by you, looking at you but not listening. Again, instead of trying to find a metaphor for the situation, I just focused on the feeling and then tried to describe that feeling with another similar feeling. What else feels the same level of that boredom? How about when you watch a movie and you get so bored that you start to look around the cinema? You start to look at your watch and wait for the movie to end? This allowed me to connect the two emotions.

Here is the opening to a poem I'm writing about coming home to a relationship that is falling apart. Again, instead of creating metaphors through senses, I just created them through feelings and emotions.

-

Shipwrecked I swam ashore

to the front door

of

Our home

-

Passed the closed gate

An empty stadium awaits

The graveyard of the living room

A strange name

For the vacuum

That suffocates this space

-

We communicate through satellites

Sat side by side

-

I wanted to detail that extreme tired feeling you get when you have to do something but you don't want to do it. What else would feel a similar level of exhaustion? Swimming away from a shipwreck. Then I wanted to explain the feeling of not wanting to be there, of the place itself not wanting you to be there. What gives me similar feelings? A closed gate, an empty stadium. What about that awkward feeling of being in a room where neither of you wants to be there with the other person? Being in a graveyard gives me the feeling of being surrounded by people but at the same time being alone. Then, the feeling of just going through the motions with the other person, where you are talking but not saying anything, there's a distance between you and neither of you wants to talk about the issues... communicating over the phone feels very impersonal to me, so even though the other person is sitting next to you, it feels like you are talking on the phone with them — I pushed this even further by saying you are talking by satellites because it feels like you are on the other side of the planet.

Anyway, I assume most of you already know all this, and this is how you come up with your metaphors in the first place. Maybe it's because of my aphantasia and my inability to visualize, but I have found creating metaphors an almost impossible task. Since coming up with this method of linking things via emotions rather than senses, my writing has improved dramatically! Maybe not so much the quality, but the flow is infinitely easier now that I have this technique. So, this post is for other people like me: if you are struggling to come up with good metaphors, don't use your senses; use your emotions instead. Link the two things together by how they make you feel; I think you will be surprised by how it will speed up your metaphor creation.