Metaphors for writing

Confession: It's not that I refuse to get out of my comfort zone. It's that there are only a few ways that I'm comfortable leaving my comfort zone. In other words, my comfort zone has a comfort zone. It's all recursive.

Reading:

• "L. DeBard and Aliette: A Love Story," by Lauren Groff
  
• The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton
  

Writing:

• "Ferian Fetlock Catches a Cold" - Outline 85%
  

Revising:

• "The Revenant"
• "Cora and the Sea" - Third draft 50%

I made a bit of progress on Ferian today. I only updated by 5% because I'm only about that much closer to the ending, but I did quite a bit more in the way I restructured the part I had already done.

It's like differential equations in mathematics. Wait, come back! No formulas, I promise. Differential equations are used to model relationships, like that between the populations of predators and their prey. (Classic DE problem, that.)

If there are a lot of predators and few prey, the predators starve and die out. That means fewer of the prey are eaten, so their population increases. Then you've got lots of prey and few predators. So the predators feast, and the population of the prey decreases. It's a vicious cycle. Literally.

How this system behaves, though, depends on what are called the initial conditions. You might hit a perfect balance between predators and prey, and there will be no change at all. You might set conditions that set up a cycle like the one I just mentioned. Or there might be so few prey and so many predators that the predators kill them off completely, and the whole population goes to nothing. It all depends on the initial conditions.

When I'm outlining a story, that's the point where I'm making things up as I go along. I usually know the ending I want to achieve, and I kind of know where I'm starting from, but the path is hidden from me, and I can only find it a little bit at a time.

Sometimes, I realize that path is heading in the wrong direction. But everything that has happened before it has followed logically, and to force the path to take a different direction would actually make the story feel contrived. So I have to go back and change things so that the direction I want is the one that follows naturally all along.

And that's what I've done with Ferian today. My initial conditions weren't quite right. I've adjusted them, and now I think I'm heading in the right direction. I won't be sure until I get where I'm going and take a look around.

Who would have realized that mathematics would be such a good metaphor for writing? Well, any mathematician who is also a writer, probably. And that got me thinking about other metaphors for writing.

Would a metaphor about metaphors be a metametaphor?

Here's one I came up with earlier this week. Good prose is like a liquid. It flows, and it can't really be compressed any more than it already is. There's surface tension, and hidden currents beneath the surface. (I couldn't figure out how to work Brownian motion into this, but if you have an idea, let me know.)

Bad prose is a gas. It needs to be compressed before it can become a liquid, like good prose. Bad prose can expand to fill any size container, but without having any more mass that in started with.

What happens if you take good prose and compress it even further? Then it turns into poetry. Poetry is a solid, you see. You really have to dig into it to be able to understand it. Poetry sits around in tiny little chunks not doing much. You kind of have to defrost it and turn it into prose in your head to get any meaning out of it.

I know, feel free to disagree, but this is my metaphor. If you don't like it, then consider--you're learning more about how I feel about prose and poetry than you are about prose and poetry themselves.

Of course, there are other states of matter. Like plasma, a superheated gas. What kind of literature is that?

That's erotica, of course. It's bad prose, but it's really, really hot.

Publication Status:

• Submitted: 5
  
• Accepted: 1
• Rejected: 1
• Pending: 3