Metaphor

A metaphor describes one thing as if it were another, without 'like' or 'as', so the qualities of the second are transferred to the first and the comparison is asserted rather than offered.

The meeting was a long corridor with no doors. The meeting is not a corridor, and the sentence says it is anyway. That assertion is what separates a metaphor from a simile, which says like a corridor and keeps the two things apart. Metaphor collapses them, which is why it hits harder and why it is easier to get wrong.

Metaphor examples

• All the world's a stage. Shakespeare, As You Like It. Why it works: one flat claim, and the speech that follows spends itself on the consequences: entrances, exits, parts to play.
• It is the east, and Juliet is the sun. Romeo. Why it works: she is not like the sun; for him, right now, she is it, and the certainty is the character.
• Her inbox was a slot machine that only paid out bad news. Why it works: it tells us she keeps checking anyway.

A metaphor can also run for a paragraph or a whole book (an extended metaphor), but most of the work in fiction is done at the scale of a single phrase.

Dead metaphor examples

The foot of the hill. The leg of a table. Grasp the point. Run the numbers. A flood of complaints. Time is running out. These were images once and are now just vocabulary. They are not errors, and hunting them all down produces stilted prose, but a page built entirely out of them has no pictures in it at all. The fix is not to remove them; it is to make sure a few live ones sit among them where it matters.

Mixed metaphors

We need to unpack this bottleneck before it snowballs. Three images, none compatible, and the reader sees the collision instead of the point. The test is literal: draw it. If the picture is absurd, rewrite, usually by keeping one image and turning the rest into plain words.

The metaphor that suits the narrator

A subtler problem is the metaphor that does the narrator no favours. In close narration, every image should be one that character could plausibly reach for, since a farmhand and a naval officer do not notice the same resemblances. That is where metaphor stops being decoration and becomes show, don't tell: the choice of image is a fact about who is looking.

Frequently asked questions

What is a metaphor?

A metaphor is a figure of speech that describes one thing as if it were another, without using 'like' or 'as': 'the meeting was a long corridor with no doors'. It carries the qualities of the second thing over to the first.

What is a dead metaphor?

A dead metaphor is one used so often that nobody sees the picture any more, such as 'the foot of the hill', 'the leg of a table' or 'grasp an idea'. They are ordinary vocabulary now, not mistakes.

What is a mixed metaphor?

A mixed metaphor combines two or more images that do not fit together, such as 'we need to nip this bottleneck in the bud'. The reader sees the clash instead of the point.