Hans Erik

“Against the canvas of the night,

Appears a curious celestial phenomenon…”

-Mos Def,  Astronomy (8^th Light)

Is the night sky really canvas?  No.  When you read this line do you suddenly see the sky as a thick black material arching above you?  I do.  This is the power of metaphor.  Metaphors are mainstays of good lyric writing and creative writing as well.  In their simplest sense, metaphors are the collisions of ideas or things that don’t belong together.  Metaphors must not be a physical reality. Like we said, the night sky isn’t literally canvas, it’s just a bunch of atmosphere without sunlight.  But what if you look up in the sky and see, as Mos Def probably did, something thick and black with stars almost painted on it?  Now the sky can seem like a canvas against which curious celestial phenomenon appear.

Humans are endlessly capable of weaving seemingly unconnected ideas into something with meaning.  Metaphors are perhaps the greatest example of this.  Let’s take a look at some ways to generate metaphors.

The Connecting Idea

Metaphors work and often arise from one simple principle:

Something has a quality, in the case of  “the night” it could be thickness, or blackness, or even the fact that the sky can look like a surface. Now, something else shares one or more of those qualities, in this case it’s canvas. Thickness, blackness or surface all connect “the night” to “canvas”.  They are the connecting idea.  Metaphors that couple two nouns like this are called expressed identity.

Expressed identity metaphors come in three flavors:

1. One is “X is Y”  (as in the night is canvas)
2. Another is “The X of Y” (like the above example, the canvas of night)
3. The last is “X’s Y” (as in night’s canvas)

Another kind of metaphor is called a verbal metaphor.  These involve conflict between the verb and its subject.  His cut was crying blood. Cuts don’t really cry, but by taking one characteristic of wounds, that they bead up and drip, and using an unusual verb that also describes this phenomenon, crying, we have created a collision.  The connecting idea in this case is beads up and drips.  In one case it’s blood and in another case it’s tears, but both bead up and drip.


The last kind of metaphor is called a qualifying metaphor.  In this kind adjectives qualify nouns and adverbs qualify verbs.  Examples of this could be a furious storm or laughing blindly. Storms don’t have emotions nor can laughter be blind but qualifying metaphors use an unrelated adjective or adverb to infuse some new meaning into a noun or verb.

Creating Your Own Metaphors With Word Collisions

Alright, now you’re going to create your own metaphors using word collisions.  For the first part of this take a piece of paper and write 5 adjectives on one side and 5 nouns on another.



Now take your lists and start cramming the words together and see which combinations are interesting.  Remember, metaphors must not be able to be real.  Swollen eyes is not a metaphor because someone can actually have swollen eyes.  Swollen railroad is a metaphor because railroads can’t really be swollen.



Now mix them up for a second round.



You should be able to start to see some real possibilities for your metaphors.  I could see how both my railroad metaphors could lend themselves to a lyric about how the railroads “gobbled up” the countryside and brought a whole new level of traffic to previously untouched wilderness.  Or how much that crass, crotchety lawn mower bothered me the other day while I tried to nap.  All from the blind plucking of words out of the air.  Word collisions yield some surprising results.  Give them a try and leave me a comment with some of your favorites!

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