Serious Metaphor Rant
Written July 5, 2003

I believe that it’s important to forge your own metaphors and phrases rather than borrowing from the existing junk pile when writing anything of importance or creativity. It’s hard though sometimes; the mind instantly draws upon the tried and true descriptive terminology when confronted with the need to express something, and it occasionally takes a severe show of willpower to rip yourself away from the well-cleared path of cliché and travel the more difficult route. Just now I had to actively prevent myself from using the phrase “well-trodden” which, while not exactly a linguistic mainstay, still feels like something I’m taking from the past rather than creating on my own terms. The problem is that it feels like all the roads have been taken before and the literary landscape is a wide expanse of prairie which has been trampled into infertile dust by every writer since the dawn of time. How do you find something new? Where is the uncharted territory, the opportunity to discover something completely original and previously unheard of?

The answer lies in modernity and the features of language as it has recently evolved and transformed. English descriptive words and phrases have always been based around culture-specific concepts, slang and objects. Take the word “forge” for example, which I unwittingly used in my very first sentence as a synonym for “create”. As far as I know, this word goes back to the times of blacksmiths and knights, where it was used to describe the beating of raw metal into items of various usefulness such as swords and horseshoes – a form of creation. Much later in history it was hijacked for the purpose of describing the creation of illegal documents or money, but the base implication remained that something was essentially being created if it was “forged”. And this is all well and good as alternate ways of describing creation are definitely necessary, but why do we have to draw them from centuries-old metalworking practices? It’s just a habit. Nobody really “forges” anything in the 21 st century, but the word has been kicked around for so long that it just instantly comes to mind when writers are faced with certain expressive challenges.

Today’s writers need the strength to use their own experiences, and the experiences of the society around them, to describe what they are compelled to say. While many distinguished professors and cultural elite may see the modern experience as “boorish” and “lowbrow” (two more clichés), I think the fascination that many scholars and writers have with the terms and conventions of the distant past is exponentially more insulting. What’s wrong with today, the world that we live and love in, that you have to ignore it completely in favor of expressing yourself with catch-phrases drenched in historical obscurity and comparative irrelevance? I want to see metaphors that represent our times, new phrases that draw on the rich variety of modern life – underground counter-culture and the suburban mimicry that invariably follows, the high-tech business world, a stifling blanket of mass media that oh-so-subtly twists and turns the entire world.

I have no desire to see literature fall to the point where it relies upon tawdry cultural references and second-deep political phenomena – rather, it should focus upon the essential experience of our generations as a reference point. Beauty can be found in the ethereal shifting darkness of an oil spill amongst the icebergs and fear can be found in the right-edged slabs of grey that form a tight cubicle around someone, consigning them to a lifetime of imprisonment.

Uh...work inspired rant. Not sure what set this off - perhaps I was sick of technical writing and how boring it was? Anyways, I'm pretty sure I never finished it satisfactorily, but I also have a feeling that I'll never be able to pick up where I left off. That bothers me, but what can you do?