What is change?
Is it when an infant ages into a toddler? When a bud blooms into a rose? When a collection of particles bursts into life as a star?
Sure, those are all examples of change, but is it possible for us to give a sense of change to someone who has never experienced or learned about anything else?
Change is a concept—like love, like truth, like hate—we give these concepts meaning by connecting them to experiences. You know love from the warmth of a hug from a friend; from the soft nudge on your fingers from a street cat; from the way that a mother holds her child. You know truth from the tangibility of a promise—from the pungent smell of rosemary. You know hate from the twisting feeling in your stomach or the bitterness that coats your tongue.
Because, really, how do you go about explaining these ideas to someone who has never experienced anything? You can introduce someone to the color yellow, to the taste of cinnamon, to the feel of concrete—there’s something tangible for them to gauge with one of their five senses, the same can’t really be said for abstract concepts.
To know change or love or truth or hate is to experience it, but how exactly can we go about explaining these abstract concepts, say, in writing?
You can begin by trying to connect something substantial related to these ideas, as in, you can try to evoke the feeling of an experience that your reader has felt before…but therein lies another issue: how can we emulate these emotions in our stories for a group of people with a wide variety of different life experiences?
Luckily, in writing, we have a multitude of tools called literary devices that we can use to help us emulate the feeling or experience of such concepts—one widely used tool in many different forms of writing is the metaphor.
The metaphor is a comparison between two ideas that aren’t necessarily logically connected. Another similar tool is the simile, in that both devices are used to compare ideas, but they are different in that the metaphor executes the comparison without using words such as “like” or “as”.
This gives power to such connections by allowing the two ideas to essentially be thought of as one and the same—you can develop emotional depth in your story by connecting your ideas to things that are familiar to most people.
When writing on love; when crafting a story on the romance between two people—you can liken an embrace to the warmth of the Sun in the morning. You can speak of the eyes as windows to the soul. A laugh can be the chorus of stars in the sky. In building truth within a character’s words, there is the certainty of the Sun rising in the morning; the reliance on the ground beneath you; the confidence that the sky will not come crashing down when you step out of the house.
The same can be done when writing on change—there is the changing of the leaves in the fall, the shifting of the sky as the hours pass, the becoming of a red giant from a star.
Metaphors enable us to emulate for our readers the emotions or ideas we try to represent in our stories. When writing on abstract concepts, it’s much more compelling to evoke emotions and experiences that are tangible than it is to simply define them.
Sources
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/metaphor/
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3331393?seq=1
