In William Butler Yeats' "Wild Swans at Coole" he writes regarding the passage to flight of the swans, he heard "the great bell beat of their wings." What nonsense! We know birds' wings can never sound like a bell; nevertheless, Yeats' image has the power to evoke the experience of birds rushing away from water.  

Similarly when Churchill described the yoke of Russian repression as an "iron curtain" cleaving Europe, he didn't mean a physical barrier, yet his image had great evocative power.

What Yeats and Churchill drew upon was the power of metaphor, a power open to the greenest aspiring fiction writer as well. 

Metaphor is simply the implicit comparison of one thing to another, sometimes including the use of "like" or "as," which we then call "simile." A metaphor may be long and elaborate, e.g., T.S. Eliot's "Let us go then you and I/ While the evening is spread out against the sky/ Like a patient etherized upon a table" or as simple as a single comparative verb, e.g., she "rumbled" into the room, they "steam-rollered" the opposition, or he "cowboyed" away from the stop-light. 

While metaphor is potentially a powerful pictorial device, carelessly used it has the capacity to "torpedo" a writer, making work appear slapdash or unoriginal.

We call such worn metaphors "cliches." Virtually inevitable in speech, cliches are avoidable in writing because the writer has the luxury of time to reflect and invent. 

We are all familiar with the thousands of cliches that litter the language -- pretty as a picture, sharp as a tack, sinful as chocolate, the idle hands of the  Devil's workshop. And as a device of dialogue, a cliché  can be intentionally used as did Flannery O'Connor in "Everything That Rises Must Converge" to characterize Julian's mother as an unoriginal thinker, but carelessly scattered in a writer's expository passages, they render story-telling lifeless and dull. 

On the other hand, a fresh, accurate metaphor can make narrative sparkle. Consider such classics as MacBeth's "My life has fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf" and his despairing lament "Out, out brief candle" (of life), or "Life's but a poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage." In skillful hands fiction  writers of distinction invent such metaphors as these:

* Joyce Carol Oates describing the teenage protagonist of  "Where Are you Going, Where Have You Been?" -- Her laugh was ...high-pitched and nervous anywhere else like the jingling of charms on her bracelet" and a paragraph later as the teenager enters the fly-infested restaurant it was "as if they were entering a sacred building that loomed out of the night to give them what haven and what blessing they yearned for."

* Tim O'Brien's Kiowa describing the death of  Lavender in O'Brien's Vietnam story "The Things They Carried" -- "It was like watching a rock fall, or a big sandbag or something --just boom then down-- not like the movies where the dead guy rolls around and does fancy spins and goes ass over teakettle."

   Some fiction writers even elevate metaphor to the symbolic level as does Flannery O'Connor in "Greenleaf"  when the Greenleaf bull comes to her window "head raised as if he listened -- like some patient god come to woo her." Several paragraphs later O'Connor has the same bull "standing about four feet from her, chewing calmly like an uncouth country suitor," the bull having become more than just a bull now, but the symbol of the inexorable, grasping nature of the family of Greenleaf yokels. 

But is metaphor a necessity in fiction? Apparently not. Hemingway in his spare classic "The Killers" uses but one metaphor -- the killers exited the restaurant "in their tight overcoats and derby hats they looked like a vaudeville team." 

And in Raymond Carver's "Where I'm Calling From" the style is flat and conversational with only rare laconic metaphors; for example, when the narrator and the other hospitalized alcoholic lean back in their chairs and get ready to chat "as if we were getting ready to talk about our bird dogs." And if writing can be devoid of metaphor, is there also such a thing as too much?

Certainly. A superfluity of metaphor results in a strained, amateurish style, sometimes labeled purple writing. But what else can go wrong with metaphor? Horrible comic possibilities threaten as in these student metaphors.

* Tonal Inappropriateness: "The bullet passed through the heart as smoothly as a worm through vaseline."

* Ponderous Quality: "Tragedy appeared like two trains leaving the station, one at 9:12 p.m. from Chicago, the other at 8:56 from St. Louis."

* Mixed Metaphor: "The jeep bull-frogged through the desert with the speed of a forest fire."

* Inaccurate Metaphor: "The speakers knees trembled like imploding girders in Nagasaki during atomic attack."

The bottom line is a fiction writer can choose to employ metaphor as a powerful device, which in the hands of a real artist can reach the sublime. On the other hand, used in overabundance, and poorly thought out, nothing can ruin a beginning writer's work more surely than the two-headed dragon -- metaphor.

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