9 - Metaphor and choice

Summary

Everyone communicates, and a lot of people write, but few people dare to call themselves “writers.” If you feel like an impostor, take a deep breath and remind yourself of your unique purpose and how important it is. Or take on a fictional persona and write through that mask.

Eight ways to conjure your writing genie,Maximizing Meaning in Your Text (web tutorial)

What I have offered in the preceding chapters is not an exhaustive account of all of the figures we use to talk about and think about writing. Other figures come easily to mind. For instance, when we write arguments, we are sure to encounter Argument Is War – a metaphor brought to our attention by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their ground-breaking book, Metaphors We Live By. The metaphor of Flow is just as common, as is its corollary, Writer's Block. We often encounter metaphors of cooking, tasting, chewing, and swallowing. Metaphors of birth and nurturing abound. So do many, many more.

But my objective has not been to catalog all of the everyday figures that populate the discourse of writing. Instead, I hope to have described the conversation that shapes our ordinary figurative discourse about writing. All of the figures we use in order to think about writing operate in relation to that conversation. Once we understand the patterned way that conversation proceeds, we stand a good chance, I believe, of making sense of the countless metaphors and metonymies we use to describe writers and writing.