Living in metaphors

One of the things that I think all writers do is constantly have their mind elsewhere. If you see a writer, from the amateur beginner to the seasoned professional, with their gaze lost somewhere in the distance it’s likely that they’re actually thinking about a story they’re writing or else planning on writing. In some cases they’ll be thinking about a story they’ve already written and wondering how it could be improved. If it’s been published, they’re likely mildly regretting not incorporating some wonderful change that occurred to them five minutes after the book had been sent to print.

Thinking about stories is actually a ton of fun, to be honest. It might be hard to understand for people who don’t like writing, but it’s actually a great way of keeping yourself entertained. You don’t even need a notebook, although I never leave the house without one in case I come up with a good idea (at least a good idea for my standards, anyway!). Suddenly, commutes are no longer a chore, or at least not such a gruelling one, but instead a time to be in the sole company of your mind and your stories. I liken it to meditation: you have to be enjoying the moment. You don’t think about the shopping list or after-school activities for kids or the lack of hygiene of your co-commuters.

However, there is one element of this process that drives me slightly bonkers. I’m going to put it out there in the hopes that someone will say ‘that happens to me too’, although I’ve got the nagging worry that this is not all that common. My problem is that I think in metaphors all the time.

I like to use settings as metaphors, where the metaphor is not just a concrete object, but the whole environment. For instance, I once wrote a story where the main character had dismantled his house brick by brick and was trying to reassemble it in a different way, but he was finding it hard to fit all the pieces exactly where he wanted them. As he spoke to a friend, the reader realised that it was all a metaphor for a huge change that had occurred in his life to which he was having trouble adapting. When I read it like that it sounds kind of dumb, but I can assure you it wasn’t that obvious in the story itself! The problem here is that almost anything that you do in real life can be used as a metaphor. Is the train stopping often? Off the top of my head, that’s a metaphor for either your life not moving as smoothly as you would like or for your colon acting up. Are there workers cursing and blaspheming on the scaffolding? That’s a metaphor for chaos in a relationship or in a neighbour meeting.

The same thing applies to objects, and there the metaphors can get seriously unruly. A kettle can reflect a conversation with your mother-in-law (getting progressively hotter until the pressure is too much and it pops, geddit?) or the slow coming together of two disparate people. A painting can reflect a character’s state of state of mind or its determination to change something. Seriously, I could go on all day.

So why does it drive me bonkers? Because sometimes it’s too much. Sometimes you have to give your brain a rest, leave it fallow for a bit. Not everything in the world is a sign, you don’t have to use absolutely every second of your day to write something. At times my mind is on at full steam when I’m trying to get it to slow down. That is especially bad at night, when I’m trying to sleep, and I’m going over the events of the day. Good luck trying to convince my head to just sleep, for crying out loud! I try to bribe it with the possibility of dreams, which are also a great source of material, but it’s hard to be scheming with your own brain: after all it’s the one that comes up with the ideas.

So now for the big question: anyone out there with the same problem?