Prognosticatory Metaphorizing or Crazy Talk?
"In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose above the great mountainous island of Tremalking. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning."
Take a moment to read the quote above again—it comes from the opening paragraph of the first chapter—slower, paying closer attention and even, perhaps, imagining someone saying the words out loud. If one hears a voice like James Earl Jones, the words probably do come off sounding like the portentous opening narration to a serious fantasy film. Okay, now imagine the words are being shouted on a street corner by a rail-thin guy with a ZZ Top beard who could probably benefit with mental health counseling to deal with his delusional non-sensical ramblings. Both are kind of easy to imagine, aren’t they?
Keep in mind The Path of Daggers is the eighth book in a series of monumentally long fantasy novels and, notably, it is the shortest to that point. The rambling quality of this opening line of a first chapter commencing nearly forty pages in could make one wonder about the state the author might have been during its composition. Ironically, despite being shorter than the previous novels, it seems noticeably less disciplined in its construction of prose and dialogue.
How to Handle Jealousy In One Easy Lesson
One would think that in fantasy quest novels where there is always some grand goal to be accomplished, minor irritants like those things which make romantic entanglements so much fun people just can’t get enough of them secondary thoughts. Turns out, however, even when battle Dark Ones and the fate of the universe hangs in the balance, there always room for petty emotional tumult:
“Snatching the flecks of jealousy that suddenly were floating through her, she pushed them into a sack and stuffed it into the back of her head. Then she jumped up and down on it for good measure.”
Tangled
The topic remains jealousy and, in fact, the proverbial metaphor follows immediately upon the imagery of stuffing the sack of snatched flecks of the stuff. It is a short leap from an obvious construction of meaning in metaphor about love to one which is a little more misandrist and a little less than kind:
“Kittens tangle your yarn, men tangle your wits, and it's simple as breathing for both.”
Shock and Awe
Certain emotional reactions can be more difficult to convey through metaphor than one might think. Presenting the idea of being truly shocked is especially difficult because nearly every metaphorical image that can effectively be pictured in the mind has almost been exhausted. The key word here being almost. As the example below demonstrates, the clever writer can still manage to find very effective similes capable of producing just the right visual representation of what it is like to be truly shocked:
“The pair of them looked almost as if they had expected this! Annoura, though, with her mouth hanging open, appeared as stunned as he, like a fish who had just seen the water vanish.”
Closing Lines
The closing line uses metaphor to wrap everything up and gently pave the way for the next installment. Which is really the kind of job that metaphor should be for. The closing imagery provides a callback to imagery which has been of significance to the narrative while allowing for the ambiguity required as the bridge to the next book standing where “The End” would normally be:
“Across the nations the stories spread like spiderweb laid upon spiderweb, and men and women planned the future, believing they knew truth. They planned, and the Pattern absorbed their plans, weaving toward the future foretold.”
