When Metaphor turns into Hyperbole

As someone who tries to be a writer, I feel like one has two specific jobs: first to have the dedication to get your butt in the chair to actually do the writing, and second to use requisite imagination and vocabulary to make a killer story.

Unfortunately, most people fall into two categories, people who have it the whole package and have their ducks in a row (they're so fly too, they're all classy, ducks, with tuxedos and crap), and people like me, who only fulfill one of the jobs. I am a pantser. I get stuck in the chair and I flop around like a dead fish with opposable thumbs gripping my pen with absolute despair. I wait and hope to the dear sweet muses that they sing me a lovely song. And soon.

                             ( Pictured here: a sad song of dali; even muses have budgets)

The problem that can sometimes happen here is when you finally get to your chair and you finally get a lock on what you're writing about you get excited ... too excited. Your descriptions are huge and cumbersome like a granny on a forklift, charging forwards for black Friday sales your sentences are over wrought. You might just kill someone.

See a metaphor, thanks to our trusted friend Wikipedia can be defined as “ a type of analogy and is closely related to other rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via association, comparison or resemblance” that can be taken while not literally, as something that is closer to life .

“He's strong like an oak”. Yup, I get that he's not literally made out of an oak tree, but I know that his strength, while exaggerated could be preeety close to true.

But if we drag out our old friend Hyperbole, the sentence goes from “He's strong like an oak tree” to being “He's bulldozer strong with ten extra chainsaw arms and he breaths fire”.

 

You're a bit too excited.

 I know that's a lie. Hyperbole can be defined as a deliberate exaggeration for effect that is not meant to be taken literally, like not one bit. A pretty common example you might hear often is “God, my backpack weighs a freakin' ton”. Yeah, man I feel you, its a heavy bag. But you and I both know that it does not in fact weigh a ton. That's the effect of hyperbole. Metaphor can be subtle and evocative, and hyperbole can sneak around, but it usually does so with lead plated boots and stomps around. Its an attention sook like that.

So, when you're writing, watch out, and pay attention to what sorts of rhetoric you're using. Sometimes hyperbole is the delicious frosting details that can make the scene or set the mood. Or, on the other hand, if your metaphor sort of hulks out into an ungainly beast that distracts everyone from your writing you've gotta cut it out. Take a step back and ask if you're maybe going a bit far.

Metaphors and Hyperbole

Her hair is a fiery blaze

Her hair is a lobster dancing with a fox on top of a firetruck.

            One of these is hyperbole and the other is a metaphor. Can you tell which one is which? Tricky I know. Clichés aside, which of these doesn't make you want to punch the writer in the face? Which one makes you think of what kind of drugs this author was on and where you can get some rather than a faceful of hair? Hopefully you answered both of these with the second one.

            I have nothing against hyperbole; it has its time and place. I don’t want to lock all examples of hyperbole away in some kind of weird language prison, yeah try to imagine that for a minute. [Side note: make your own call on whether that’s a metaphor or hyperbole.] We use hyperbole all the time without even thinking about it; for example: "I’m freezing" or "I ate a ton of fries." If you aren't going for comedy then I would suggest refraining from using hyperbole because, while it's sometimes fine, the point of hyperbole is to go over the top in a ridiculous fashion.

            Metaphors are safe. (Right?) You can say whatever you want as long as you are comparing two things not using “like” or “as”. This is where many people run into THE ACCIDENTAL HYPERBOLE! THE ACCIDENTAL HYPERBOLE is a terrifying creature. It is the mutant offspring of a well-intentioned writer and a burning desire to be unique. Nobody likes clichés but when you are sick of using clichéd metaphors and you force original ones for no reason other than “Nobody likes clichés” or “I’m so original” without putting much thought into it you end up with, “His eyes were blue moldy cheese”.

                                                                     Dreamy right?

            Original metaphors that work are fantastic, but if you can’t come up with one and are trying to be serious please just go with the figure of speech that no one is going to have to read three times before finally admitting “Nope, I read that right. It is just awful”.

The Marriage of Metaphor

            Lately, on my walks home from class, listening to the songs on my iPhone, I can’t help but feel a little depressed about the music I’ve been listening to. (And not because it’s all a sap fest. Promise.) It’s because lately, I’ve been thinking about metaphors and how they work in the songs I listen to and the poetry I read and try to write. How do you clearly, interestingly, and honestly, write out your world for a poem? It’s hard.

            The essay I read, “Orpheus Recalling Eurydice” by Anne Simpson, was all about metaphors and how poets encounter and experience them. The author had a really neat point at the very start of the essay: that “We ourselves, are meaning.” Essentially, that “when we mean something, it’s like going up to someone…we go up to the thing we mean.” Metaphors, Simpson states, begin with the familiar and then shifts into the unfamiliar. This exchange allows the poet and the reader to challenge the familiar and nakedly expose it.

            Michael Crummey, a poet originally from Newfoundland, starts his poem “Capelin Skull” in the familiar, describing hundreds of thousands of fish washed up on a shore. He then sinks into the unfamiliar, illustrating the beached fish as survivors of a shipwreck. The waves he writes about take on the quality of a bus, stuffed with “passengers bound for oblivion/ limbs and heads hanging recklessly/ through the open windows.”

            In her essay, Simpson writes that metaphors are a marriage between imagination and creation: that the job of a poet is to make that marriage work. Crummey makes that marriage work in an effortless, natural way.