The Writing Experiment by Hazel Smith

and events. Metaphor helps to add extra levels to the text, although in
Chapter 8 I will point out some of its pitfalls and limitations.
Inexperienced writers often want to create metaphors but do not know
how. As we saw in the last chapter, using a word pool can result in some
unusual metaphors, and you can certainly employ the word pool when
you are writing poems. You can, for example, think up a central idea and
then find combinations of words from the pool that fit well with it. Often,
activating the word pool will make the idea unfold in new directions.
However, another way of creating metaphors is to focus on the process of
transfer: seeing one object or event in terms of another. Let’s look at some
strategies for doing that.
The sentence ‘she stood in front of the door wondering whether to open
it’, if read in the context of poetry, can be perceived as a metaphor in itself.
It could suggest, for example, that the woman is on the verge of a major
personal or political decision. The door could be the threshold between
the conscious and the unconscious, the personal and the political, and
so on.
It would, therefore, be perfectly reasonable to leave the wording of this
sentence as it is. It was William Carlos Williams who famously coined the
phrase ‘no ideas but in things’. What Williams meant was that we don’t
necessarily need to create metaphors, because objects and events resonate
with meanings beyond themselves anyway. You may decide that construct-
ing metaphor is rather artificial, and that you prefer a more direct
approach to writing: we will see in Chapter 8 that there are many other
alternatives. However, understanding how to create metaphors is a funda-
mental strategy that is useful to know about, whether you decide to
implement it or not.
So another way of saying ‘she wondered whether to open the door’,
would be, ‘she asked herself the question whether she should open the
door’. If we turn the door into a question mark, or compare the door to a
question mark, we can create a metaphor or simile:

Example 2.19

the door hangs

like an unanswered question

A variation on this would be:

Example 2.20

the door calls

but she cannot find

her reply.

Genre as a moveable feast 41