The Writers’ Nook is a place where we, as a group, can provide a safe and positive environment in which to encourage one another and hone our own writing skills.
Metaphors, dead or alive
Linh Nguyen, on her website says:
“Metaphors are illuminating, helping us to see things in a different way. They provide new insight and can change the way we think. They’re more than devices; they’re central to how we understand the world. They don’t belong solely to language, but help us to reason and understand what’s around us. New ideas are frustrating, imagination will always be compromised by reality and sometimes we can find it difficult to grasp something physically, like the universe itself; but when given an abstraction of the physical through metaphors, something clicks into place, and we understand it on a conceptual level.”
The Handout
Please download and print this Handout. Bring it with you to the meeting, these are the topics we will be discussing. If you cannot access the Handout, contact me and I’ll email a copy to you.
The Challenge
Your challenge after this meeting is over and before our next meeting on October 8th will be to write and submit a story, poem or essay. Try to use in it a some meaningful and original metaphors. Of course you can write about anything you want, or you can use one of the following prompts:
— Choose a vivid time from your childhood. Narrate the events related to the childhood memory that you’ve chosen so that your readers will understand why the event was important and memorable,
— Remember the fairy tales and mother goose stories we learned as children? Retell one of these stories from the villain’s point of view, OR
— Submit anything you’ve written in the past.
Responses
(Members, after reading the following responses, please continue on down this page to Comment on them. This is where we provide feedback to one another; this is one of the ways we learn from each other.)
Childhood Memory by Marilyn McAllister
Childhood Memory by Marilyn McAllister (edited)
Lady Godiva by Joyce Adrian Sotski
Childhood Memory: Marilyn, your experience opened my eyes and I thank you for sharing. I can only imagine what it felt like to spend six months on your back in bed, as a child, and then to have to learn to walk all over again. And that followed by the joy of going home for Christmas! You even had to eat on your back? How did it feel? What was it like? Then it dawned on me, like is a word you use in comparison, as in using a similie, which is like a metaphor — and that’s what we’re really talking about in our handout for this week. Would I have felt the essence of what you are saying in a more intimate manner if you had used more metaphors to explain? If you had likened your experiences to something I could relate to? Actually, you did use some metaphors, ‘Doctors are Gods,’ I get that. But would it become more powerful if you revised this piece, using more metaphors and similies? Just a thought…
Marilyn, I just had a secondary thought. A friend sent me an email last week saying that, “Revision is like tossing sandbags off the side of a hot-air balloon,” so maybe that would be like opening a whole new can of worms!
Childhood Memory: Marilyn! What a difference this edited piece made in my thoughts and feelings when I read it. I could feel your fear of the operating room; I even knew without you saying it that nobody had talked to you to calm your fears. Everything you’ve said is so much more powerful. These changes you’ve made helps me to feel viscerally, how you must have felt, instead of just reading it like a newspaper article.
Joyce your story is excellent. I enjoyed it thoroughly especially the thought that experimentation with who we believe we are, or want to be is universal to all young people. We all want to exerience feelings of freedom, love, belonging, and acceptance, not matter who we are. Great story!
Joyce what a wonderful fantasy. Very descriptive. A childhood fantasy that takes me back to my own childhood and my stories.