Last week I talked about the essence of metaphor creation, that they are essential the collisions of ideas or things that don’t belong together. We explored this through an exercise called Word Collision, which is essentially the “accidental” creation of metaphor through the random pairing of nouns and adjectives. This week I’d like to be a little more purposeful and give you two guiding questions that drive and inform all good metaphor creation.
The trick is in identifying the connecting idea. Here are the two questions you need to get to the heart of it:
- What characteristics does this idea have?
- What else has those characteristics?
Let’s see this in action. I’m going to pick something to illustrate how the metaphors come tumbling out with just these two questions. I’ve picked the police as my subject. Now I ask myself, “what qualities do the the police have?” and just start listing the fragments:
- protect
- corrupt
- peace keepers
- abuse
- power
- control
We’ll start there. Now I ask myself, “what else has those characteristics?” Just take one of the words to start. I’ll take protect:
- Guns protect
- So do houses, buildings, and bomb shelters
- Clothing protects, raincoats, sorrels, gloves.
Let’s see what we have:
The police are the guns of society
The police are the bomb shelters of the city
A raincoat of police
I kind of like that last one. You can just see the police fanning out. Let’s keep going. Corrupt:
- The Mob is corrupt
- Dictatorships are corrupt
- A computer virus corrupts a computer file.
The police are the mob of the city
The police are the dictators of society
A virus of police
Again, I like that last one. It’s a bit abstract, (what exactly does a virus of police look like?) but it gives me the general impression of an out of control force working towards a bad end. Alright, one more. Let’s take power:
- Hurricanes have power
- So do horses
- Ferrari’s have power
- The United States has power
- Cannons, tanks, and explosions have power.
A hurricane of police
An explosion of police
The police are society’s cannons
Again, interesting. I never would have thought to say, “a hurricane of police”, but I think it is a rich metaphor in that I can see them moving with the speed and ferocity of 100mph winds. See how many metaphors I’ve generated? And that was just from three of our words. There’s no limit to the number of ideas you can generate. Now you try. And by all means, drop me your favorites in the comments below.
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