The Sound of Sorrow
Portraying the overwhelming, soul-crushing experience of profound despondency resulting from inexhaustible grief is not an easy thing to do. Visual imagery along almost always fails to convey the interior emotional turbulence. A better choice: sound and vision.
“His howl beat at the walls, the howl of a man who had discovered his soul damned by his own hand, and he clawed at his face as if tear away the sight of what he had done. Eveywhere he looked his eyes found the dead.”
Translation, Please?
Not all metaphorical imagery is immediately understandable. Sometimes the problem lies in the metaphor; usually, it is a failure of transmission on the part of the receiver. In cases like these, a translation is often necessary. You’ve been there before:
"The leaf lives its appointed time, and does not struggle against the wind that carries it away. The leaf does no harm, and finally falls to nourish new leaves.”
“But what does that mean?” Perrin asked.
“It means that no man should harm another for any reasons whatsoever.”
In Dreams
Dreams are always a good place for an author to exercise a little muscle power in the flexing of metaphorical weightlifting. Put a character into a dream city where all aesthetics are raised to the infinite power and see what happens:
“He joined the throng streaming across the bridge and into the city through massive gates set in tall, pristine walls. Within was a wonderland where the meanest structure seemed a palace. It was as though the builders had been told to take stone and brick and tile and create beauty to take the breath of mortal men.”
Like a Tiger and a Tail
One of the predominant uses of metaphor in this book and those that follow in the series is that of the proverbial idiomatic expression of an underlying truth about the human condition. As often as not, there will be an element of personification in this metaphor in which animals are engaged in one way or another to underscore the point of interest to human survival:
“Sometimes you have to grab the wolf by the ears, he reminded himself. But he remembered another old saying, too. When you have a wolf by the ears, it's as hard to let go as to hold on.”
A Real “Up” Person
Don’t you hate it when some expresses a generalized optimistic desire for a certain outcome and then punctuates that with a slightly different variation of the same desire only to make a sharp left turn at the end and offer their actual downbeat forecast through metaphor? Confusing? Good, because that illustrates the punching power of metaphor to suggest something that merely describing the way it works fails to do:
“I hope they are all safe. I hope they'll walk up to this fire any minute. But hope is like a piece of string when you're drowning; it just isn't enough to get you out by itself."
