As I’ve gotten older, I’ve run out of metaphors.
Everything I used to write used to be full of them. I couldn’t describe an emotion of any character without using a metaphor comparing it to something. A rush of water breaking through a damn, feeling trapped in a box, etc.
I think partially it easy because of reading so much YA fiction, which is riddled with metaphor on metaphor. I felt like good writing had to be full of metaphors.
At the time, good writing was the ability to put together a metaphor no one else has used before. To be able to explain thoughts and emotions usually making a comparison to something else.
Metaphors felt easy to me. Having characters express everything they needed to say in multiple drawn-out paragraphs, every line charting a comparison to something else.
I think it’s because I hated writing dialogue. I liked having characters develop by living inside their mind, not having them speak to others. Dialogue between two characters never felt natural, it always felt forced and fake.
It felt so easy to write the through process going on in someone’s mind. I didn’t know how to make characters show the reader what they were feeling through actions or words spoken to others. I couldn’t describe emotions through something they did with their hands, their furrowed brow, the downturn of their mouth. I definitely couldn’t have them express any emotion other than happiness or despair out loud even though there’s an infinite number of feelings that exist beyond that binary.
So, I used metaphors as a crutch, coming up with really elaborate ones to try to make what I wrote seem impressive and to distract the reader from noticing it was really devoid of everything else. Those words were easy to find, something that could capture most of the emotion I was trying to convey but leave the messier bits out, not get to the stuff that I didn’t want to write down or make real.
Maye that’s because the characters I used to write were always a small reflection of myself and I didn’t like that level of introspection.
But then I started this project.
One day I sat down at my computer, opened a word document and just started writing about what I was thinking about that day because I had no one around to say it out loud to. I had too many things in my head and nowhere to put them. And there weren’t metaphors like before, because there were no characters. There was just me and a lot of complex, thoughts and feelings.
And I found out that those pieces of writing aren’t bad writing. That different isn’t bad. That not everything has to be nice and pretty and tied up into a perfect sentence. That things can be disjointed and messy and not all the correct words need to be there all the time. And that I can write about myself, not just hide bits of myself in different characters.
And over time this project has made me fall back in love with writing. With putting words on a page and releasing them into the atmosphere.
And maybe soon I’ll be able to write character’s again after this. Characters who won’t need metaphors to express themselves.
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