Let's Get Cracking with Metaphor

Irene Cooper | November 4, 2025

But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.

                                                                   Aristotle, "Poetics," 1459a 3-8, via etymonline.com  

No shade to Aristotle, but I have to question the master’s definitiveness. (Also, his attachment to so-called ‘genius,’ which many a working writer understands to be less useful to her writing than plain persistence—but that’s another blog for another time.)

I have no quibble with describing metaphor as an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars. That’s money. It is, too, the focus of week three at The Forge creative writing program—how a curious and masterful use of metaphor can make one’s writing sing, and why this kind of resonance isn’t just for the poets.

Common Ground, Creative Tension

Years ago, in a workshop focused on imagery, the instructor asked us students to go deep with our observations of the world, to find meaning—or more precisely, feeling—in material and movement. A writer in our cohort wound up comparing a heartbreak to the cracking of an egg three rooms away—nearly unhearable, profoundly irreversible. A heart is not an egg. (Heck, the valved and bloody heart is not even the heart of heartbreak.) In comparing what is dissimilar, however, the writer brought to our attention what is—or could be, if we let it—common to a heart and an egg, and oh, so poignantly. (I’m still a little mad about how good that metaphor was.)

In literary and working writer discussions of metaphor, the energy that comes from this combination of similar and dissimilar is called ground and tension. Like the notion of superposition in quantum physics, it’s easier to let it wash over your brain than to try to pin it down. Here’s the thing: the body gets it. The comparison doesn’t require perfect symmetry to thrum. When we students collectively gasped at the notion of the distant cracking of an egg, it was our bodies that responded—to the sound, faint as faint can be, and to the mind’s eye image of the broken perfection of the shell, never to be the same. The ground: the egg and the (already metaphorical) heart as vulnerable vessels; the tension: the heart, unlike the egg, will, in all likelihood, recover.

Breaking Down the Big Ideas into Piquant Canapés of Feeling

Why compare at all? Well, as we (me, sometimes) say at The Forge, we turn to metaphor because Abstractions Are Often a Big Unmarked Rubbermaid Bin Taking Up Space in Your Text, Holding the Things You Really Want to Say. Metaphor in creative writing helps the mind make sense of the body by speaking directly through the senses. Sure, we can write, “The old man was lonely after his wife died,” and we will have said it in way that can be understood. Or, we can say “The man let out a little moan each time he opened the closet door and heard the hollow clacking of the empty hangers on his wife’s side,” and readers will have felt lonely in their bones (specifically those tiny bones in their mind’s ear, where those clacking hangers will continue to echo).

I’ll be eager in the coming week to talk about how the homework went, as it includes a close read of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Left Omelas,” and an assignment to write an original allegory—an extended metaphor, or as I like to think of it, a metaphor with a mandate. Nobody knew better than Le Guin: you’ve got to break a few eggs to make an Omelas.