metaphor

Gail Caldwell’s memoir & metaphors

August 6, 2011 | 9 Comments

The use of running metaphors in a piece—all related in some way to indigestion or water or loneliness or roller skates, or with a surrealistic or violent cast—will guide the reader in a particular direction as surely as stock can be herded.—Annie Proulx I’ve been skimming John Irving’s newest novel, Last Night in Twisted River. I started out reading, but it asked more of me than I can give right now. With classes looming, immersed in my own rewriting struggle, …

[Read More]

Playwright David Hare on reality art

June 4, 2010 | No Comments

David Hare, known as a “verbatim playwright” for his plays taken from news events, gave a lecture on the relationship between nonfiction and art to the Royal Society of Literature in which he drew the distinction between what he does and ordinary daily journalism. In a nutshell, “without metaphor we have no art,” he said. The Guardian printed an edited version, under the headline “David Hare: mere fact, mere fiction.” In turn, I excerpt it here: Journalism is reductive. This …

[Read More]

Noted: Annie Proulx

December 27, 2008 | No Comments

from an interview in The Missouri Review, Vol. XXII, No. 2 “The research is ongoing and my great pleasure. Since geography and  climate are intensely interesting to me, much time goes into the close examination of specific regions—natural features of the landscape, human marks on it, earlier and prevailing economics based on raw materials, ethnic background of settlers. I read manuals of work and repair, books of manners, dictionaries of slang, city directories, lists of occupational titles, geology, regional weather, …

[Read More]

Noted: Tony Earley

December 21, 2008 | One Comment

from an interview with Tony Earley conducted by Hattie Fletcher for Nidus “I can’t write any piece, fiction or nonfiction, until I come up with a metaphor. I hate the idea of writing on only one level. Often just walking around through the world, I’ll see something and think, damn, that is a great metaphor—for what? And so I have a metaphor, but I have no thing to hook it to. And so, a piece usually results when I find …

[Read More]

Deeper into meaning

September 1, 2008 | 4 Comments

Ian Frazier tells an amusing story in The New Yorker (May 26, 2008) about a man at a soup kitchen who dismissed Frazier’s credentials as a writing coach. The guy blew off Frazier, sitting at a card table soliciting for a writers’ group, saying he’d already had a famous teacher, novelist John Cheever. Frazier asked him what he’d learned, and quotes the guy: “Cheever, you understan’, he was a brilliant writer. When he wrote something he always had two things …

[Read More]