Don't fall into the metaphorical trap

I am currently editing some stories for a creative writing anthology about to be published by UEA. And I’ve noticed a common habit among the writers. I’m not writing this to poke fun at the writers in the slightest. It’s a habit I’ve noticed in a lot of creative writing recently so I thought I should address it. 

The habit is to write overly complicated, ‘writerly’ descriptions. By this I mean descriptions with a lot of metaphors, similes and beautifully worded analogies. And they can be beautiful. But they can also be very hard to understand and make the narrative very hard to follow.

I think a lot of writers fall into this trap because they think that’s what makes good writing. But the use of metaphors, similes and analogies is a discipline. You need to learn how to pick your moments, your metaphors and how to word them so they don’t trip up the reader.

Firstly, in my opinion, you shouldn’t have more than two metaphors – at the most – in one paragraph. Your readers don’t want to get bogged down by lots of different mental images that don’t conflate. Extended metaphors are fine. You can come back to the same metaphor multiple times in one paragraph, as long as you don’t get carried away with describing the metaphor rather than describing what’s actually happening in the narrative.

The other problem with using ‘writerly’ language in description is that it tends to be passive. I’ll use an example from a first draft of one of my own stories. I wrote ‘a ripple of shushing breezed past him like torn paper’. I liked the description, I liked the simile. But it was confusing. The description was too passive so my proof readers didn’t know who was doing the shushing, who they were shushing and why.

The other danger of using this kind of passive writing is that it’s easy to focus in on one object in the description rather than describing what’s happening in the entire scene. I’ll explain what I mean by this. I’ve read a lot of stories recently in which the writer takes care to describe in detail what, for example, someone’s foot is doing. Or a fist. And it makes the narrative too confusing. It’s like watching a film in which the camera is constantly focused on just one body part. If your character is punching another character, say that’s what he’s doing. Don’t describe the kind of shape his fist makes, the sound that it makes when it hits the other character’s face, without first describing what’s actually happening in the scene.

I hope this week’s entry didn’t sound too preachy. And I hope some of you find this helpful.

Thanks for reading.