My Battle with Metaphor

Much of your writing life has been conducted in an uneasy relationship with metaphor, beginning with a distant memory of some teacher telling you you could never hope to understand romantic poetry, which of course you at the time wished to write, without some degree of intimacy with it. But with some notable exceptions in your reading, it became apparent to you that you'd have to find some other way in with romantic poetry because so much of it, metaphorical, allegorical, and simile-like, did not stand the test of time. This was about the time you discovered William Carlos Williams, but that is for another time, since this means to stay for at least a few paragraphs on the subject of metaphor.

You began filling notebooks with such metaphor and simile as you encountered, reaching the point where you hoped never to see another and wrote for yourself in simple, declarative sentences that seemed pretty straightforward and uncluttered. It was no wonder you felt a growing affinity with the then pulp magazines, mysteries, science fiction, and westerns. Lousy pay rates but you were pretty prolific at the time and saw your clear to making enough to keep you in books, a night a week out at some place where jazz was to be had, and something adventurous to throw in the crock pot.

Then you discovered Raymond Chandler, who seemed to produce metaphor the way you produced excuses. Out the window, sometimes even literally, went the straightforward declarative sentences. What are these, Richard said one night when he came by your window to meow, a way of signaling you out of the house without awakening neighbors, stepping in the process on balled sheets of paper. Metaphors, you said. What are these, John Carroll said when you turned in pages on a screenplay. Metaphors, you said. Lad, he said. He wanted to say more. As long as I'm paying you, there will be no more goddamned metaphors in the screenplays.

Look, I said one day. Raymond Chandler uses them all over the place and they even hired Faulkner to do the screenplays of his novels. Lad, he said. He wanted to say more. It may be vulgar for me to say this but you can, if you wish, blow your nose without using a handkerchief, which is precisely what most of the people who will pay to see this movie would do if they thought they could get away with it and which many do without even thinking about the consequences.

I arrived early the next morning with thirty some pages, and not a single metaphor. When I drove down the sprawl of driveway, I saw two men,drunkenly brawling near the porte cochere. As I approached, I recognized one of the brawlers as John, cocking his arm back for a swing. "You son of a bitch," he said to his opponent. "If you had any decency, you'd tell me where you are." Both his eyes had been fairly well puffed beyond vision. "And you," his opponent said. "If you were half the man you make yourself out to be, you'd stand still." Thus spake not Zarathrustra but Clark Gable, a frequent roistering companion of John.

"Is that you, Lad?" John said as you approached. "On a Saturday?"

"I brought some pages without metaphor."

"Why would you do that?" Gable asked, turning in my direction, his face as bruised as John's. "Why would you write anything without a metaphor? Goddamn you, LaFitte [for that was John's true surname]What have you done to this man?"

At which point, John's mother called to inform us breakfast was ready.

"Christ," Gable said, "I thought we were at my place. What the hell are we doing at your place? Where is my car? I suppose you sold it."

John had abandoned or forgotten the causes of his fight with Gable, turned to you. "You see, Lad? With people like us, metaphor is unnecessary?"

You actually wanted to believe that and for a time you did, but there did not seem to be on the pages you wrote the things you hoped would be there. You could not articulate what those things were. You looked for them in vain. It helped some that Christopher Isherwood spoke to you of times when he deliberately tried to cause the pockets and hems of his denims to appear threadbare, "Saintly in their wretched simplicity," he said, but there was nothing wretched nor simple that you could find in his writing; it was all elegant and pointed as well as honest.

They come at you now with the persistence of telephone solicitors, male and female, asking you how you're doing today, approaching you like coffee stains on a freshly laundered shirt. They have made you as wary as a man with dandruff venturing out of the house in a blue suit. Of course you check for them. Why, a student once asked, do your comments on our stories always contain metaphor?

Your answer could have been--but wasn't--synecdoche; the part always representing the whole or the whole always suggesting a part, or things wanting to connect as if on their own. You would have to be two ants shy of a picnic not to get the message.

Hey, kid, get away from that paragraph! The shouting elders.

Back in the days when you had shed your cocoon and had begun to become aware of the increasing number of outer things to study, things such as grass and flowers and trees, which could yield such succulent surprises as sour grass to chew, snapdragons to play with, and the Ceratonia siliqua tree which produced the remarkable snack of St. John's bread, you were increasingly aware of elders whose mission in life seemed to be intoning "Hey, kid, get away from that_____" filling the blank with an appropriate noun.

This awareness of shouting elders came at a time close enough to your learning how to read that you cannot say for certain which came first, the warning or the reading. No matter, it is a certainty that until this very day, March 9, 2010, you had not conflated the two, the shouting of warning or the learning to read.

Many paragraphs in your life--entirely too many--had that built-in tone of voice that conveyed "Hey, kid, get away." In a sense, you are now traveling back to your youth, a whimsical sort of Captain Nemo, going under the surface of reality to such exposures to those two wimpy kids, Dick and Jane and their wimp dog Spot, as in "Look. Look. Look. See Dick run. See Jane run. See Spot run." In comparison to some of the paragraphs awaiting you through grammar school and what you had come to consider a death camp, junior high school, Dick and Jane and Spot were an idyll. After all, they did get you through the vocabulary and verb tenses. And yes; it is true; the "Hey, kid, get away!" voices that inhered in all those dreadful paragraphs of all those dreadful text books did move you inexorably toward the notion of constructing your own goddamned paragraphs to do with as you damned well pleased, which more often than not was to construct a story in which something of consequence would happen to someone of some consequence to you.

Equally true, there have been equivalents of elders and contemporaries telling you the equivalent of "Hey, kid, get away." to your paragraphs and stories, but these have imbued you with a stubborn determination to mostly plod forth, hopeful of shedding that youthful outer coating of rebelliousness merely for its own sake, the teen- and twenties-years surliness, and those tendencies linking admiration for other writers to a path that was more derivative than you might have wished.

Your paragraphs have a goal in life, a mission they hope to realize. Each of them that goes forth is much of a piece with an actor, who has been waiting in the wings for a cue to enter, delivering not only a series of lines and a logical vector but an attitude, a voice, a presence. Your paragraphs are, without having articulated it as such before, wanting to steal the entire freaking scene with their presence. This has nothing whatsoever to do with delivering the punch line of a joke or a "J'accuse!" indictment but rather the entire package of meaning, feeling and presence that contributes along with the other paragraphs to delivering a story that in its turn fills the reader with its presence. Your theoretical, metaphorical paragraph is synecdoche personified, the long arm of the law, the American Olympics team, the part standing forth as representative of the whole.

Go, paragraphs!

The Proof of the Padding

Somewhere in one of the volumes of his autobiography, Graham Greene expressed regret that he'd done one of his novels using six points of view, retrospectively thinking five was about the maximum a writer could use without muddying the story and perhaps even causing distraction.  With the obvious exception of Twain, Greene remains an author you have read closely and often.

In the WIP, Secrets of Casa Jocosa, you are at Chapter Seven and are already there are six points of view.  Your instinct is to go forth, adding points of view as they come to you because the story has become a synecdoche, a situation where by design there are numerous residents, all of whom have one or more secrets, thus does Casa Jocosa become the part of something is used to refer to a larger thing; an institution becomes representative for the entire human condition.  The secrets of the various characters assume a near-equal status to the characters.  True enough, you could have a few characters wandering about, outing some of the other characters, but it seems to you more dramatic and certainly more fun to see if you can't have the secrets emerge as the result of interactions among the characters.

There is such mischievous pleasure involved in tweaking real persons into characters for this particular story, then turning them loose as though they were wind-up toys, now crashing into walls, then crashing into one another.  One such individual combines two characters who represent differing period in your Hollywood days, another synecdoche in which Hollywood days represents your own whimsical immersion in the TV-film industry, of which you were once able to write on some resume or other, your most significant experience in the TV-film industry was using the Writers' Guild Credit Union to purchase a VW Beetle.  Budd Capelouto is your character's name, of whom another character is heard saying, "I knew him when he spelled his name with only one B."

As you noted a few days earlier, you may have stumbled on something primal with the notion of defining characters in terms of their secrets.  That observation may need to be filed under an earlier still observation that for each new story, regardless of length, you need to learn how to write all over again.

For the moment,pages are coming.  When they do, you look on and applaud.  When they don't, you need to scurry about looking for ways to make it happen.

Three Ways of Looking at a Character

first person--a form of dramatic narrative in which an individual using the pronoun I becomes the filter through whom the events of the drama are filtered; not necessarily Adam, as implied in some texts, but rather a presence who becomes the author's appointed agent to relate the details of a fictional history. The first person narrative became popular at a time when it was believed that the narrator was relating actual events in actual settings, a belief that resurfaced during the middle years of the twentieth century when a confession-romance literature of I-narratives found massmarket magazine audiences.

The first person narrator may play a direct role in the story being related, in which case he or she becomes the individual in whom the reader invests emotional and psychological capital, a notable example being the eponymous narrator of Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March. The first person narrator may also play an ancillary role in the story such as Nick Caraway in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, a presence used to good example by the author as it became apparent that Caraway was being exploited by the major focus, Gatsby.

As with all other points of view, the writer must endow the first person narrator with enough quirks, obstacles, relevant background, and goals to provide a distinct personality, including but not limited to vocabulary, a place on the optimism/pessimism scale, prejudices and antipathies, and a history with some relevance to the story at hand.

Having constructed the platform of attitudes and goals for the first person narrator, the writer must then quantify a place for the character on the naive scale, in which the writer assesses how relatively naive or realistic the character is. The naive narrator does not see individuals and events the same way as cynical or realistic narrators might, thus does interpretation become an important factor in the forces driving the first person narrator.

One of the stated technical disadvantages for having a first person narrator is the need for that individual to appear in every scene in order to be able with plausibility to relate the scene to the reader. With a little thought, the writer will quickly see through this limitation by, for example, allowing the narrator to be "off stage" at a particular event, the hear the details of the event from one or more other characters. This limitation may also extend well into the past by having the first person narrator encounter diaries journals, or newspaper accounts of an event that took place earlier. A greater technical obstacle still apparent is the overuse of the pronoun I, which stands just a tad more virulent than obvious and ungainly locutions used to avoid the obvious repetitions of the I.

Two splendid examples of first person narrative are Charles Dickens' Great Expectations and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, each of which has survived the Still Readable and Inspiring After A Hundred Years in Print test, and one of the most enduring first person narratives, "Call me Ishmael," had to have bee written in first person because Ishmael was the only survivor of the ill-fated Pequod.

About the appropriateness of first person narrative, critics, editors, and teachers are divided; it is an idiosyncratic call best answered by listening to the characters, who should have a hand in the decision of their being rendered as I or he or she. The true test to be applied to a character is the plausibility that character presents to the reader.


synecdoche--a figure of speech that is first-cousin to the metaphor, it posits the whole being greater than the sum of its parts or the parts representing the whole, or the parts of one thing relating to the whole or parts of another thing. A gifted surgeon, for example, may be referred to and represented by her hands. Similarly, there is the synecdochal long arm of the law; a crew, particularly of a ship, being referred to as hands; plastic being used as a symbol for credit cards, which of course obviate the need for carrying around sums of paper, or money. Knowing the synecdoche may result in a higher SAT score and be good for points in a literary criticism course, but it may also have the unwanted effect of becoming an albatross or weight about the neck (or any other part) of a story, so much so that its over abundance will cause editors and readers to defect.

When the subject of metaphorical writing comes up, it should be regarded in the same way as weather reports and landscapes are regarded--with extreme caution. For writers such as Raymond Chandler, they--the metaphors and synecdoches--arrived as appropriate devices that shed shorthand light on a situation, an attitude, a condition, a character--not as a blinking neon sign calling attention to the writer's cleverness. By all means, note and admire them when they are found in the work of other writers, but do not try to get them into your own work through some sense of literary nepotism. If they are to come in your work, they will come of their own, and even then should be subject to critical scrutiny. Do they make things better, or do they in negative synecdoche become the literary equivalent of an energetic kid, showing off in class?


bigger than life--a quality often attributed to characters after the fact of their having been read; a sense of an individual having a combination of traits, qualities, goals, and strategies that make him or her memorable for individuality while at the same time representing a particular type, thus, for example the adjective quixotic as it represents Don Quixote, who left an indelible reference guide on a segment of society. Not to be confused with implausible behavior, the concept of bigger than life reflects a vision of an individual that radiates either a single quality or warring internal qualities. Consider Pat Conroy's bigger than life Lieutenant Bull Meecham, from his novel The Great Santini. By all accounts an argumentative, bigoted, bullying sort, Meecham was a dazzling aviator, a man who metaphorically was king of the clouds, a man who, when the choice unexpectedly fell on him, risked then gave his life to save others, causing readers to feel shock and grief at his death. Another bigger than life character for splendid example is The Wife of Bath from The Canterbury Tales, a portrait of a woman with attitude, goals, and grace who has remained an out-of-the-ordinary paradigm for five hundred years.

It is possible to track bigger than life individuals from the distant past, when characters were either of noble rank or forged on the field of battle, or in the castle drawing room, or otherworldly, but effective drama now is about remarkable men and women from more modest stations in life, performing in ways that belie the limitations that go with their situations; men and women who sense talents and obligations which they--not being able to afford horses or cars--walk to greatness.

Bigger than life characters are made of the clay of ambition, responsibility, love, devotion, and vision necessary to seek and then effect change. To render them, the writer needs to know who his characters are, what his characters want, what they are willing to endure to get what they want.

It Don't Mean a Thing if it Ain't Got That Swing

We have taken into committee the various ways ideas may present themselves, then allow themselves to be invited in out of the rain of indecision for some shelter while the ideas begin to feel at home.

By the "committee," I refer to that riotous and unruly group of personae, the individual aspects of the self wanting some voice in the matter. As is the case with any faculty whether it is the faculty of a department wherein one teaches, or perhaps faculty in the sense of a once-a-year construct such as a writers' conference, politics enter the landscape, manifesting political responses in proportion to the degree to which other members of the faculty are regarded by the you, the pilot, the guiding light. Wired into the constituents of most faculties, whether they are actual faculty members in a school, institution, or committee, or aspects of a single self, expressed through the synecdoche of the various parts making up a whole, there are frequent cases of interior discord.

Truth to tell, there are parts of the committee you may not be in sync with much less agreement or accord. You in fact greet traces of their presence with a kind of austere fatalism. After all, you've known of oe another for soe while.

All of this prologue to the ecosystem in which ideas, which is to say challenges, what-ifs, calls from one of the muses, are set forth. You have not yet dealt with the contingencies of a) having written a thing with a very clear agenda in mind, only to be persuaded by the burden or logic or indeed by the awareness of the lack of compelling logic that the idea at hand needs to be reversed, changed, shifted; or b) you have stumbled upon a surprise of such a dynamic nature that it causes a change of chemistry in the neural pathways or in some other manner causes you to change course.

a) and b) supra are consequential, little doubt about that. They become more of consequence in direct proportion to the degree by which you can be rendered idle by an argument or conflict between the two poles.

All the more reason for having in command one of the more committed, vocal members of the conflation of selves. The most efficient way of causing this cohesion of selves is with a shrewd chemistry of determination and blackmail I'm eager to get this material worked over to my satisfaction, eager to get at the intangible pleasures of working out the task. Democracy works well much of the time; it may evn work well much of the time within ourself, but it takes a radiant pole star--enthusiasm, anger, desire for revenge, desire for change, desire to define with some emphasis--to serve as guide. Curiosity works, too. What would it be like if..? This last aspect seems to me the basis of speculative fiction and the engine of the investigative essay, the one where you set forth with an hypothesis, establish that it is indeed an hypothesis rather than a straw man to be merely knocked down, then look for an answer you either did not know you had or an answer that satisfies you.

Emotions are the ballast to hold the hot air balloon on course without them the story or the essay is what it is, a big bag of hot air.