The Figurative Language Rock

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Welcome to the Inside Creative Writing Podcast, the weekly discussion of craft and technique for writers of fiction and creative nonfiction. And now here's your host, writer and educator, Brad Reed. Welcome to a bonus episode of the Inside Creative Writing Podcast. When there's a topic I'm dying to talk about, but it's not quite enough for a full episode, it's time for a bonus episode. Today's topic, sharing my figurative language rock. Welcome back to the show.

My name is Brad Reed and I'm thrilled that you are here today for the first of hopefully many bonus episodes for Inside Creative Writing. We're gearing up right now for the relaunch of full episodes of the podcast here in just a couple of weeks, but I couldn't wait to get started, especially with the topic that we're going to talk about today. Now, before we dive in, a few important updates since we last got together, honestly, several years ago. I want to let you know about the new website. We're now over at www. bradreedwrites.

com. That's our new website where you're going to find a lot of the resources that we had before. Now you can still call in with your questions, requests for episode topics and share your favorite writing quotes by calling us. You can find that number on the website if you missed that. And that's just basically an answering phone, so you can call, leave us a message and actually hear your voice on a future podcast. The other thing I'm really excited about is the Patreon team that's starting to come together for the show.

Now I've been busy creating and uploading what we're calling real-time revision videos where you can watch as I write and revise my own work in real time, warts and all. It's a great way to see how the techniques we talk about on the show translate onto the written page. You can find out how you can be part of that team and get access to those videos by going to bradreedwrites. com and clicking on the Patreon link.

Introduction to Figurative Language

Okay, so on to our topic of the day. I want to introduce you to something I call my figurative language rock. Now this is an actual real rock that sits on my desk. In fact, I'm looking at it right now, but I want to introduce you to why I have this rock on my desk. Before we do that though, I want to talk about and just review quickly, what is figurative language, just in case it's been a while since we've thought about that phrase or maybe sat in an English class and learned about it.

So figurative language is any piece of language, any phrase that cannot be literal. So think of something like, it's raining cats and dogs outside. Now, if that were literal, that would be a horrible, horrible day to literally have cats and dogs raining outside. Or think about something like, hey, you've hit the nail on the head, right? Which we understand means you got that exactly right.

But there's this metaphor going on, right? You've hit the nail on the head somehow comes to mean figuratively that we got something right. Or an example from what is possibly my favorite book, depending on the day that you ask me, The Grapes of Wrath, this one, the full green hills are round and soft as breasts.

Now that's a beautiful piece of language, very evocative, very visual that Steinbeck uses to paint the picture of his landscape. Definitely not literal, right? If you went to those full green hills and scooped up a handful of dirt, they would obviously not be round and soft as breasts.

So anything that isn't literal is going to count as figurative language for what we're talking about today. So I want to talk to you about my rock. So literally right here on the desk next to me, I have this kind of craggy old, I don't even know what kind of rock it is. I should, I should research that a little bit. You can actually find a picture of it over on the website along with this episode at bradreedwrites. com.

And you can see it just looks like a regular rock found by the side of the road, which is exactly where I found this rock. I was headed to teach my creative writing class one morning. And as I was thinking about how to introduce my students to the concept of figurative language, this idea popped into my head.

So it was a rainy kind of cold winter morning and I pulled off the side of the road on the way to my class and started digging through these pile of rocks next to the side of the road. The funny thing was, is just as I had bent to pick up this rock that for whatever reason kind of appealed to me, I stood up, I'm sitting next to my car in the dark off the side of the road holding this great big rock. And this police officer comes around the corner and shines his lights right on me. And there I am looking a little suspicious early in the morning, looking for rocks on the side of the road, kind of caught in his headlights. It must not have looked that suspicious because he just kind of watched me for a second and then pulled on by.

So he must have, must have not been too suspicious of me. Anyway, that's where my actual rock came from, but the actual rock is not that important. It's what it symbolizes.

So here's what I want to talk about with this figurative language rock. If I were to tell you that this is a rock, if I were to have this in my hand showing it to you and say, Hey, this is a rock. All you could really say to that is, yep, you're right. There's nothing exciting or interesting about that statement. It's just a statement of fact. And if we put that in a piece of writing, this is a rock.

There's no opportunity for any reader input there. There's no opportunity for a reader to help make meaning of that statement. In other words, your, your reader is just passively taking in information.

So when we're speaking literally, the only role our reader has is as listener, right? And in understanding the literal things that we're saying, but readers want things to do in a story. They want a job to do. They want little mysteries to figure out.

So here's what I do with my figurative language rock. If I were to then show you this rock and say, this rock is my heart. Now things get really interesting. And often when I teach this in, in classes and use this, some of the responses I get are, you know, I asked them, how could this be true, right? If I said this rock is my heart, how could you make that true? And they begin to respond with things like, well, it's cold and it's hard, which means that you're unfeeling and you're mean.

Or sometimes they'll say it's jagged and it's rough, which means maybe I've been through hard times and I'm a survivor, right? Even though I've had these smooth edges knocked off, I'm a survivor like this rock. Or it could be that sometimes they'll say, well, maybe it's really precious to you, right? Maybe this rock was given to you by your grandfather on his deathbed or something like that.

So when I say this rock is my heart, I'm saying this rock, it means something precious to me. Sometimes they'll say it's got a lot of angles and detail. So it infers that maybe I'm complicated and complex, right? If I say this rock is my heart, then what I'm saying is the way I feel is complicated and complex. It's not simple and smooth. And sometimes they'll say it's heavy, right?

This rock is my heart. If we're thinking about the heaviness that could imply that I'm sad. So this is the power of good figurative language. Your reader is forced to dig into their own lives, their own connections and experiences to try to make sense of your figurative language, right? They have to draw into their past and their own connections to begin to solve this little mystery that you've created with this piece of figurative language.

So in other words, they are working with you to create meaning in your writing. Now, this is what we want as writers. This is what an invested engaged audience for your writing looks like. Somebody who is meeting you halfway, creating meaning out of what you're writing rather than just sitting back passively and kind of understanding what you're talking about.

The Power of Figurative Language

So now that I've introduced you to the figurative language rock, I want to give you a couple of little warnings or things to remember about figurative language. So the first one is that it's very important that we, that we are wary of cliches, sometimes called dead metaphors. Now these are figurative language that used to be interesting, but they've been used so much that we don't really even hear the metaphor anymore or the symbolism anymore. Some examples were something like, wow, that's as big as a house, right? We don't really even hear that because it's used so often that it's no longer interesting. And we don't mentally stop and even picture what that would mean.

Or that's as small as a mouse or something like he was chicken, right? He was going to do it, but he was chicken. Now that's a dead metaphor, right? We don't think about how we don't visualize him literally as a chicken, right? That's just come to mean the thing that it meant to imply originally. Or something like he cried his eyes out.

You know, he was so sad that he went to his room and cried his eyes out. Now think about how terrible of an image that was the first time somebody heard he cried his eyes out, right? If you take that literally, he literally cried so hard that his eyes, what, popped out of his head, right? That's a very visual, compelling image, but it's been used so much that it's lost all of its power.

Avoiding Clichés in Writing

So we want to make sure when we're creating figurative language, we are finding that new way to say something so that our Effects of our writing can deepen character and inform your audience about who he or she is. So when you use a piece of figurative language, it's really important that it connects with how that character would think, what in their background would they connect that to. And it becomes another little mystery, right, for our readers to solve. Not only are we envisioning whatever that character is talking about in a different way, but we're beginning to understand that character on a deeper level by the types of figurative language that they choose. And here's the thing, if we're not consciously thinking about how our character would construct a metaphor, then we are essentially building that character out of our history and experience rather than our characters.

Examples of Effective Metaphors

So our readers are beginning to learn how we as writers see the world rather than the way our characters would see the world. So here's a better example, and it's better because it's from Cormac McCarthy. One of my favorite books, The Road. And this is a story, if you haven't read it, about a father and a son traveling across post-apocalyptic America. I think it's America.

Now that I think about it, I'm not sure it ever defines that, but it's certainly Western culture. And they're headed to the coast, right, among this desolate and destroyed landscape with all of these terrible people, basically cannibals that are searching and always trying to get at them. So in this kind of horrific landscape, they're making this journey. And what Cormac McCarthy here is doing in this simple sentence is he's trying to describe the sun, the way the sun feels, right?

So if you were to say this literally, he would have just said something like, and the sun circles in the fog overhead, right? That's very literal. There's no room for an audience to join him in making meaning. They just have to accept that.

OK, the sun is circling behind the fog. Listen to what he does here with this beautiful sentence. By day, the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.

Now banished sun, right? Already in just the way he's described the sun, we have a metaphor, right? The sun hasn't actually been banished. Nobody sent the sun away.

But by using that word, the banished sun, we get the feeling that the earth has somehow rejected it, right, has sent it out into this foggy distance. And that echoes the way he feels, right? As this character, he feels banished from society, banished from his normal life that he had before this apocalypse happened on the earth.

So by day, the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp. Now listen to how beautiful that was. Can you imagine the sentence if it was by day, the banished sun circles the earth like a car around a racetrack in the smoke from the tires, right? That's a completely different character that would think about that, completely inconsistent with who this guy is.

But he sees the earth or the sun like a grieving mother with a lamp and feel how loaded this is, right? So imagine where he is emotionally. He's desperately wanting to know that there's good in the world, that there's hope in the world, that there's something good out there, out there for him and his son. And this mother, this grieving mother represents that good thing, right? He's looking for that safety of home and what better represents that with a mother and a grieving mother with a lamp means that she's also searching for them, right? She's making the effort to be out there to try to find them.

So this line is loaded with meaning, loaded with character development, even though it just sounds like a simple simile. By day, the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp. So a great example from Cormac McCarthy there of exactly what we're talking about here with figurative language, how important it is and how to use it to develop character.

Conclusion and Writing Reminder

So my figurative language rock sits right here next to me on my writing desk. It's always reminding that I need to be striving to find a new way to get my audience to see something they've probably seen countless times before in a way that is authentic to the character I'm creating. So because this isn't a full episode, we're going to forego the weekly challenge and the wise words segment, both of which are coming back with the full episodes starting in just a few weeks.

But I do want to remind you that the best way to improve your craft is by writing. That's what I'm off to go do. I hope you're off to do the same.

So let's get some words on the paper. We'll meet up again soon for another episode of the Inside Creative Writing Podcast. Thanks for listening to the Inside Creative Writing Podcast with your host, writer and educator Brad Reed. We'll be back next week.