Metaphors

Plus Ça Change – July 4, 2026

…a flood rises to drown her soul, searching for its way to the sea.

There is a pulse to writing. It has a beating heart. 

A story is a living thing. So it wakes up, gets shit done, goes to sleep for a while, recovers. Then it gets up and does it all over again. And again. Sometimes the action is intense and the pulse beats hard and fast. Sometimes.

I’m in one of the slow times. I just got out of intensity, wrote several related chapters all in a swell foop of creativity, churning out the words like there’s no tomorrow, pounding annealing, shaping, hammering then to a fine luster on the anvil of my editing. Now it’s time to revisit the plotting, the planning, and the history to map a path to the destination. Five chapters in nine days, from nothing to DONE (as if anything is ever done). 

That’s a cherry-picked analysis. Before that, there were several days of plotting, researching, thinking, discussing with my #1 reader and co-conspirator. There’s a gap of almost three weeks between the chapter before this, and the latest explosion. So, measured by a different tape it’s a month to get that done, not a few days. But boy is it fun when the spigot is on.

I love metaphors. A metaphor gives you a ballpark to play in, but you fill it with events and fans. A metaphor can be trite, over used. Time is not money. Hearts are not gold. But a good metaphor is a thing of beauty.

Pulse. Living thing. Churning. Metalworking. Mapping. Explosion. Cherry-picked. Tape measure. Conspiracy. Ball park. Spigot. None of these things has anything to do with words. Words do not have a pulse, are not actually alive, aren’t butter,  and so on.

BUT.

There is an overlap between those concepts and the writing process. There isn’t a 100% match, but any astute reader gets the idea. Precisely because the overlap is imperfect, without even knowing it’s happening, you see what’s the same, the difference, and you understand. The entire experience is richer, it’s the power of abstract thought.

It gets better. Each of these concepts has some meaning to me from my experience. You too. There is overlap in our understanding, but it isn’t a 100% match. So if I pick a good metaphor that falls into your life experience, you get to apply your understanding to my ideas, and you feel right at home. I take you from what you know to where I want you to go. And we both have a blast getting there.

My challenge is to pick the metaphor with some care. They have subtleties. If my audience is mathematicians, I might pick a sine wave. If it’s amusement park enthusiasts, a roller coaster. It has to be apt for the reader, but also apt for the story. With Laveaux, the setting is the Mississippi River and the bayous of Louisiana. Water works better than fire. 

My internal rewards as a writer are real. One of them is coming up with a really good metaphor. I stare out the window at the garden, I stare at the monitor with its words, I close my eyes and drop myself into the time and place. What’s in my character’s heart? What is she feeling? What does she see? How does she relate to all the ordinary chaos of life all around her?

When that metaphor arrives, I smile and write, and make sure the metaphor is true to the narrative, and the narrative uses the metaphor to suck you in.