: Re: Creating metaphors in poetry When writing poetry, is there a known method of some kind that exists that makes it easy to turn a concept I'd like to illustrate into a metaphor? If so, please

@Debbie451

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To quickly generate metaphors I grab my thesaurus and I find words that mean the same thing as the concept I'm trying to metaphorize. I tend to pick out words that do not sound at all similar despite having the same meaning. After I have a collection of words as a baseline, I write a sentence each to describe each of them. I pick the most illustrative sentences and I expand them to paragraphs. Once that's done there is always a metaphor waiting for me in my mind. This is an exercise that I learned at a writing conference, and it almost always works for me. The presenter suggested that it's because the act of writing concrete structures describing words that mean what you're trying to illustrate gets your subconscious to think about the metaphor while you're concentrating your conscious mind on the act of writing descriptions. YMMV, but, as I said it works for me.

I asked the question hoping to get more exercises like this one, not to answer my own question, because the times that it doesn't work I often end up stuck. :)

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