Beginning a story can be a tricky thing. There’s a lot of
information that you need to get across to your readers right away if they’re going
to understand what’s going on: who the main character is, what their
personality is like, where they are, what they’re doing, etc. And if you’re
writing speculative fiction (fantasy, science fiction, horror, etc.) it gets
even worse—you’ll probably have to introduce an entirely new world to your
readers, complete with fantastic magic or technology, strange aliens or
monstrous creatures, and imagined cultures with centuries or more of history.
That is a lot to
get across to a reader, and deciding where to begin can be daunting. What can
you show the readers that will be interesting and engaging without being so
foreign as to be completely beyond understanding? What major elements of
character and setting need to be given right away, and which need to be
introduced slowly and subtly over time?
Sadly, I’m not here to answer all those questions for you.
Maybe someday we’ll dive further into those topics, but this blog is for discussing
errors that crop up in prose, not in plotting or content. So today I’d like to
highlight a common prose mistake that many writers make in the beginning
of their stories: the overuse of metaphors.
Most of you probably remember the simple definitions of
simile and metaphor that you’ve been told since elementary school: a simile is describing one thing as being like something else, while a metaphor is describing a thing by saying
it is something else even though you
don’t literally mean it.
Simile: The
castle loomed over the town like an overprotective mother watching to make sure
her children were playing safely.
Metaphor: The
train was a powerful, serpentine dragon winding through the hills, belching
smoke from its great mouth.
Simple enough, right? Now I myself am not much of a metaphor
man. I’ve heard a lot of talk about the poetic capabilities of metaphor and all
that, but at the end of the day I tend to rely much more heavily on similes. If
you’re a metaphor fan, then hey—more power to you. Just watch out to make sure
you don’t pile up a lot of metaphors at the beginning of your story.
Why? Well, because at the beginning of your story, you haven’t
been able to give all of that background we discussed earlier—all of the
character, plot, personality, history, culture, setting, or explanation of
various fantastical elements that your story might hold. And without all of
that background, your readers won’t have any frame of reference to determine
whether you are being metaphorical or literal.
For example, here’s the beginning of a story:
Kalateia stood on
the ridge surveying the dusty, bloody remnants of the battlefield. Corpses were
strewn throughout the valley below, from mountain slope to mountain slope—her soldiers,
the enemy’s soldiers, and hundreds of innocent civilians who’d had the
misfortune to live in the valley where the two armies had met. Spider-like
gravewagons crawled over the field, harvesting up bodies for use in future
battles. The heavy corpses were difficult to gather, zombies clinging to the
soil and to one another in a futile attempt to avoid the claws of the
gravewagons.
So here’s the five-hundred-and-twenty-three-dollar question:
are the corpses literal zombies or not? Are these “gravewagons” gathering up
dead bodies that are simply trampled down into the blood-muddied soil and
therefore seem to cling to the ground
like strange zombies, or are those corpses literally
undead and holding on to the ground and each other in an attempt to avoid being
harvested? Without additional context, you can’t be absolutely certain, can
you?
Even if you’re not writing speculative fiction, metaphors
can be confusing at the beginning of a story. They can give your readers a
moment where they’re knocked out of the story, where they stop to wonder, “wait,
did I pick up a fantasy novel by mistake? What is this?” Sometimes it’s only a
moment of confusion, sometimes it can be a few paragraphs or even several pages
before they can be sure that you were being metaphorical. Either way, the last
thing that you want to do during the first few pages of your story is introduce
bumps into an already-steep learning curve. Beginnings are confusing enough—don’t
add even more confusion!
You might think that your metaphor is clearly not meant to
be taken literally, that there is no way someone could think you actually meant
what you said. Something like:
The bus moved through the field with surprising grace, a
bulky cat carrying passengers to destinations unknown.
No one could take that literally, right?
Wrong. |
There is almost no metaphor so outlandish that it will be
clear to everyone that it’s not literal. So ease up on your metaphor usage
until you’ve given your readers time to get some context.
P.S.
There won't be any new posts for Wednesday and Friday this week, as I'll be busy at the Superstars Writing Seminar! Regular updates will resume on the 9th.
P.S.
There won't be any new posts for Wednesday and Friday this week, as I'll be busy at the Superstars Writing Seminar! Regular updates will resume on the 9th.
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