Metaphor and Figurative Language
With Frederick
How the Evening Began — 0:00:03
This session started not with a prepared lecture but with a question: what craft challenge feels most uncertain for you right now? The answers came in quickly—original metaphor, structure, lyricism, titles, dialogue—and metaphor pulled away from the rest. So that’s where the conversation went, with the understanding that it would be an exploration rather than a download.
One participant mentioned that she’d just been in a poem earlier in the week, trying to transfer a feeling into figurative language and not quite finding the path. Another admitted that she’d recently realized she doesn’t particularly care for metaphor—that she reads and reads and it just doesn’t catch—but that she’s waiting for it to click. The dissonance between those two responses turned out to be generative: one person wanting to feel something she doesn’t yet, another trying to get somewhere she can almost see.
What Figurative Language Actually Does — 0:07:15
Figurative language, broadly speaking, is a way of describing something in terms other than its literal meaning. The distinction between simile and metaphor is worth keeping but shouldn’t be overemphasized: a simile makes a comparison explicit (my heart beat like a hummingbird), while a metaphor asserts it directly (my heart was a hummingbird). Both are figurative; both work through the same underlying principle.
That principle: things are like other things, in ways that aren’t always obvious. We seem to learn—and feel—cross-modally. We have body memories, sensory associations, entire webs of meaning built up around any given thing. Figurative language works by connecting two such webs. When you say a car repair shop should be a dance, nobody has ever said that, and yet you know exactly what it means: it should have rhythm, grace, fluidity. You’re importing the body imprint of dance and applying it to an unrelated activity. It works because we already carry those associations.
One participant put it precisely: what you’re doing when you look for a metaphor is finding a similar experience that explains another experience to someone who might not have had the first one. The ocean spitting you out onto a beach is, in its basic physics, extremely like emerging from a terrifying psychological experience and looking back at it in horror. The vehicle and the tenor share a physical logic, a felt similarity—and that similarity is what makes the comparison land.
Dante at the Shore — 0:08:54
A participant had been reading the Inferno and mentioned that Dante is immediately in figurative language from the opening: lost in a dark wood, emotionally lost and literally lost at once, and then turning back to look at the thing he’d just barely escaped—like a man who has been battered by the sea and then reaches the shore and stands gasping, looking back at the dangerous water.
The passage, in one translation: Even as he who from the deep was short, sorely troubled, with short breath, on the shore turns round, and gazes at the dangerous water; even so my mind, which still was fleeing on, turned back to look again upon the pass, which never yet permitted anyone to live.
The accuracy of it is astonishing. The man coughing on the shore doesn’t step away calmly—he turns back, still in shock, still tethered to the thing that almost killed him. Dante is describing a psychological state, the PTSD quality of having survived something and not yet being able to leave it, by grounding it in something physical that works on exactly the same principles: the body’s relationship to overwhelming force, survival, and the compulsion to look back. Two chandeliers that can be melted into each other—and when it’s done well, you don’t even see the seam.
The Question of Originality — 0:19:00
The practical question—how do I actually find an original metaphor?—came up several times and circled back throughout the conversation. A few things seemed true.
Start with the thing itself. Not the search for what it’s like, but the thing: what it feels like, what the senses make of it, what it does to you. Attention comes before comparison. Sit with it long enough that you’re actually noticing it, not just labeling it.
Follow the sensory logic. One participant suggested that when you’re trying to describe, say, your heart beating fast, instead of going to speed—the most obvious dimension—you might ask: what else makes me lose my breath? What else has this physical quality of breathlessness and then recovery? That associative path is more likely to produce something unexpected than starting with what’s another fast thing?
Look for resonance at multiple levels, not just one. The heart beating like a hummingbird works, but it’s fairly direct: fast thing, other fast thing. It maps cleanly. What Ocean Vuong does with the hummingbird is different—he takes the sweetness, the beauty, the innocence of the image and subverts it: what a terrible life, I think now—to have to move so fast just to stay in one place. You’re carrying all your usual associations with hummingbirds (joy, wonder, delicacy, color) and then suddenly you’re looking at the exhaustion of it, the metabolic nightmare of a creature that has to work that hard just to be still. That dissonance—the gap between what you expected the hummingbird to mean and what it actually means here—is where the power is. It hooks itself into the reader at multiple levels simultaneously.
Be willing to hang with something strange. The figurative language that seems most alive comes not from craft but from a kind of openness—what Frederick called being “broken open” a little: in that state, noticing that the stamens of a lily look like little nuns in brown cloaks bowing over, and instead of dismissing that as silly, sitting with it and writing it. Or noticing that the feeling of loneliness has, to him, a quality of very big, very round, very silent eyes—mute animal aware—and following that through until it finds its natural language: with eyes like moons, as when the white-tailed deer stare at you in the hills where I’m from. That wasn’t constructed. It was almost transcribed—noticing something and trying to speak it.
The Associations Already There — 0:31:05
Any given image carries a whole web of associations, and when you use it as a vehicle, you’re bringing all of that with you—whether you want it or not. A traffic cone is orange; a tangerine is orange. They share almost nothing else. The traffic cone is blunt, modern, workmanlike, vaguely masculine, associated with construction zones and bored flaggers. The tangerine is delicate, sweet, origin-freighted, probably East Asian, feminine by most readers’ associations. The same color, completely different emotional registers. This is worth thinking through before committing to a vehicle: what does this thing bring with it, and is that what you want?
The hummingbird comparison is a useful case study. If you use it only for speed—what’s fast, hummingbird—you’re getting a limited slice of the web. You’re not touching joy, or innocence, or the specific way hummingbirds look like jewels, or (the Vuong move) the metabolic exhaustion of a creature at the edge of what biology will allow. The more you know about the vehicle, the more of its web you can access. And the more of that web you access, the richer the resonance.
Working Toward Metaphor: A Collaborative Example — 0:37:20
The group tried this in practice: pick an experience that would be hard to describe to someone who’s never had it, and look for the figurative language together.
The chosen prompt: flying on an airplane for the first time as an adult.
The first things to come out were fairly literal—fear, loss of control, being pushed back into your seat on takeoff. Then one participant said: belted into a sardine can. That’s already figurative: you’re in a hollow metal shape, tightly packed, somewhat undignified, impersonal, with a sense of shared fate. It maps well at several levels. But it has a kind of directness that limits it—it’s visually accurate but doesn’t open much that isn’t already visible.
Then: like dying in slow motion. Like your soul coming out of your body at low speed. That landed differently. The discussion of it opened up the experience in ways the sardine can didn’t. You’re lucid, you can see and hear everything around you, but you can’t speak, can’t affect anything, can’t change what’s happening. You’re relinquishing control of your fate to something much larger than yourself. The professionals around you have seen it all before and are profoundly unbothered. And if you do survive—which you will, but still—you arrive somewhere completely different, in a body that is outfitted for where you came from: you’re wearing a coat, but it’s hot.
One participant noted that in dying you see your whole life flash by quickly—which is what the flight does in reverse: it feels interminable, but you’re actually traveling at 500 miles an hour. Time inverts. Slow on the inside, fast on the outside, exactly as death is sometimes described. Another: flight attendants as angels. Another: the question Karen asked—how am I going to land?—turns out to be one of the fundamental questions of a life, not just a flight. The landing, for the first time, into a completely different place, met by people waiting for you. Which begins to look like death as transformation, as rebirth, as you’re wearing a coat, but it’s hot—the self that arrives is continuous with the self that departed, but you look like you’re from another solar system.
A participant named Sharon, working in the chat during the discussion, produced a few lines: Flying is a kind of dying. Only the steward knows your name. The echo of flying and dying does work that is both sonic and structural—the rhyme seals the equation. What the whole conversation demonstrated is that a good figurative pairing opens outward rather than closing: the more you explore it, the more territory you find.
What the sardine can and the dying metaphor have in common — 0:45:30
Both are available to anyone. Neither required specialized knowledge or poetic technique. What the dying metaphor has that the sardine can lacks is resistance—a little friction between the two sides of the comparison. The sardine can maps almost too cleanly: narrow metal tube, packed bodies, slight indignity. The comparison is economical but unsurprising. The dying metaphor is counterintuitive: the last thing you’d want to say about flying is that it’s like dying, which is the fear you’re already managing. And yet once you sit with it, it turns out to be exactly right, in ways you didn’t expect—and that unexpected rightness is where the interest lives.
Two Personal Examples — 0:22:00
The lily poem — 0:22:00
Frederick described writing a poem from a place of emotional rawness, looking at lilies on his kitchen table. The stamens—six of them, curving inward over a central pillar—looked, in that moment, like little nuns in brown cloaks, bowing. Strange. Inhuman in a beautiful way: the lily has something like a face, but the face is a featureless valley, not a recognizable arrangement. He wrote the strangeness. The figurative language wasn’t arrived at by process; it arrived by attention.
The loneliness poem — 0:24:40
The other example: writing in his mid-twenties about loneliness, in a state where his normal sense-making was a little loosened. He asked himself what the feeling felt like, tried to notice it rather than name it. What he found was something like big, round, silent, white eyes—a mute awareness that looks but doesn’t speak. Eyes like moons. And then: like the white-tailed deer in the hills where he’s from, who stare at you with that complete presence and total silence. The poem arrived through noticing and following, not through searching for a comparison.
In both cases, the emotional state was part of the access. Not suffering exactly—but being a little more open than usual, a little less defended, a little more willing to hang with something unexpected and follow it where it goes.
The Synesthetic Nature of Mind — 1:16:55
What makes figurative language work for human beings, ultimately, is that this is how we actually function. We are synesthetic creatures—we learn cross-modally, we build meaning through association, parts of us are in constant communication that doesn’t pass through language. When you say you feel like a certain color on a certain day, that doesn’t sound crazy—we understand it because we operate that way all the time.
Good figurative language isn’t doing something alien to the mind; it’s making visible what the mind is already doing. When two things wire together richly—when they resonate at several levels simultaneously, when there’s both deep similarity and productive surprise—what you’re capturing is a real connection that was there before you named it. The writing is the noticing.
Which means the path to original metaphor is less about technique and more about attention. Slow down. Look at the thing. Ask what it’s like—not just what it looks like, but how it feels, what it does to the body, what it shares with experiences you’ve had elsewhere. Be willing to follow something strange. Don’t dismiss the image that seems too odd; hang with it and see if it opens. And when you find a comparison that starts pulling you in unexpected directions—that offers you more territory the further you go—that’s the one worth following.
Closing Reflection — 1:10:45
Near the end, a participant who’d said she struggles with metaphor noted that the session had shown her something about how she approaches it: she tends to go outside, get overstimulated, let external input generate ideas. What this conversation suggested was a different direction—inward, meditative, the quieter kind of noticing that finds what’s already there. She was excited to try it that way.
That inward direction—beginning with what you actually feel and working outward toward the comparison, rather than scanning for a comparison to apply to a feeling—may be the practical takeaway. Not: what’s my heart like? But: what is this? And then: what else feels like that?
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