Spring and the Novelist

Spring. Lots of possibilities there. The season of hope and rejuvenation. To grow leap, originate, open, force.  A renewal, an opening, a flexibility. And those are only the basics. Might a fiction writer put any of this to use?

~ Renewal.

I can shake off everything if I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn. But, and that is the greatest question, will I ever be able to write anything great… — Anne Frank

Why not use the awakening of the landscape to wake your passion for your own novel?

~ Serendipity

No tears in the writerNo tears in the reader.No surprise for the writer,No surprise for the reader. — Robert Frost

Why not use the startling nature of spring to discover something new about your scenario, protagonist, opening, ending, or even your own writing process?

~ Leap.

Characters only grow by sprinting out of lethargy and into the fray.

Why not try cornering them even more than usual?

~ Launch.

Without urgency, fiction falters. Readers seek propulsion, over and over: the start and end of each scene, the first chapter, the midpoint, and so on.

At your recent talk titled “Urgency and Momentum” you introduced a new theoretical framework you’ve been exploring, that you called “request moments.” You spoke about how much of the time, most if not all of us are doing not what we want to do but what other people ask of us either directly or indirectly. Your point was to arrive at a type of necessity, that creates, as you put it, “forces in narrative that make characters do what they do.” Many stories with real urgency and momentum grow out of a simple request; someone says to someone else, “There's something I want you to do.”  — Susan Tacent Interview with Charles Baxter 

Why not seek techniques that entice your readers?

Of course like other people, many novelists find spring addictive. Time to be outside—to row, or hike, or garden. But no matter how seductive that call, don’t let it overpower your muse.

Be ruthless about protecting writing days…  — J. K. Rowling

Tip: Spring isn’t just a season or a verb. It’s a process.

Metaphors: Apt or Inept? Part I

Tony Hoagland says that

the only adequate way to describe [a metaphor] is by another metaphor.  It is a mystery hand going into a black mystery box.  The head says, “Fetch me a metaphor, hand,” and the hand disappears under a cloth.  A moment later, the hand reappears, metaphor in its extended palm.... A metaphor... is a fetching motion of the imagination.

That sounds great! But what does it mean? A bit less poetically, John Frederick Nims explains:

“Metaphor” is from the Greek word for transfer. In modern Greece, one can see delivery trucks with the word “METAФOPA” painted on their sides, they are metaphors on wheels, as it were, transferring goods from one place to another.  When we use metaphor, we transfer to one thing the identity of something else that we associate with it, as when we say that the heart of a cruel man is a stone or that a grumpy man is a bear.

Robert Frost called metaphor “saying one thing in terms of another.” More formally, the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics defines metaphor as ”a…figurative expression, in which a word or phrase is shifted from its normal uses to a context where it evokes new meanings.”

Is this relevant to novelists? Orson Scott Card believes that “Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.” A good plot makes vicarious experience concrete for the reader—functioning as a metaphor for the theme. Metaphors add layers: the Mississippi as the road of life; a white whale as arrogance; a mockingbird as an innocent who only wants to sing.

Harper Lee’s getting lots of attention these days. Why? Because the mockingbird is a perfect metaphor for destroying innocence, whether child, outcast, or defendant. The metaphor she chose is permanently imprinted on our collective memory:

“Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it.

“Your father’s right,” she said. “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy.  They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us.  That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”  -- Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

But what if she said “It’s a sin to kill a goat. After all, they just eat. Where’s the harm in that?” Would that substitution insure our continuing reverence for the name “Harper Lee”? Make us eager to hunt down anything she ever did or would write? To put it another way, “Would anyone still stalk the diamonds she penned?” Yeech.

Tip: A bad or mixed metaphor is much worse than no metaphor at all.

For what reason? If metaphors are so great, so haunting, why not just use them any way you want, as often as you want? Next time, the ten commandments of metaphor will offer ten reasons why.