Master Metaphor – Deborah Makarios

They both have heels? No?

I was re-reading some old posts the other day and rediscovered my Master Metaphor: knitting a sock. The big long-running effort in my life at the moment is finishing the accidentally-epic first draft of my current Work In Progress, working title Tsifira. So naturally, my mind turned to considering it as a sock. A purple sock, of course.

Writing a sock is actually a lot like knitting a novel. Getting started is fiddly, and sometimes takes more than one attempt. After that you seem to be just going around in circles for a very long time. Then it gets more complicated.

There’s a lot of going back and forth, the pattern changes, and what used to be sideways becomes up, and vice versa. You have to pick up a number of threads you thought you’d finished with, and then you’re going in circles again. It’s not til you look back you realize that you’ve turned the heel.

Then, just when you’re thinking there will never be an end to this interminable circling, you realize you’ve got so far that it’ll be too long if you don’t start tapering toward the end.

This is where I am at with Tsifira at the moment: shaping everything in to the end. And once that’s done, there’s only a bit of grafting the loose ends together and it will be finished.

Jabberwocky-sock — Not quite how I expected my sock to end.

Of course, this is a first draft, so there are all kinds of mistakes I don’t even know how to make with a sock: surplus beginnings, several heels (and quite a few turns!), extra length where not required (okay, I definitely know how to do that one) and the toe shaping could well turn out too pointy or too blunt.

But that’s a first draft for you: messy as, and looking like nothing on earth. And this is where the sock metaphor falls down a bit (hur hur), because it’s really very hard to rewrite a sock. Either you undo the whole thing and start over (not recommended) or you cut and paste (definitely not recommended).

The point of the master metaphor is not, of course, that one thing is analogous to another, but that having done one thing that seemed difficult or impossible, it is possible to do another. And so with this.

A great deal of rewriting lies ahead, no doubt, but one day I shall hold my finished ~~sock~~ novel in my hot little hands, and that will be awesome, even if it doesn’t keep my feet warm.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some toe-shaping to do.

What’s your Master Metaphor? Know any good metaphors for rewriting? How is a raven like a writing desk?

I recently read The Creative Compass by Dan Millman and Sierra Prasada, and came across the really rather interesting idea of the Master Metaphor. To quote:

“At some point in your life, perhaps more than once, you achieved something, despite the odds against it, because of a longing or determination that you can’t fully explain. It might be a skill that initially seemed out of reach or a one-time accomplishment: jumping off the high diving board, delivering a speech at a school assembly, or travelling to a distant country. That experience, as distinguished by the inexplicable feeling that accompanied it, forms your Master Metaphor.”

It doesn’t have to be an accomplishment that the world deems great, it just has to be something that was hard but you did anyway. A symbol of your ability to succeed against whatever’s pushing the other way – tiredness, lack of ability, your own character flaws.
It’s the ace up your sleeve you pull out when the chips are down. (Mixed metaphor? Not sure.) I did that, I can do this, you tell yourself.

It took me a while to figure out what my Master Metaphor could be, given my propensity for giving up if I don’t get it right the first time, a besetting flaw if ever there was one.
Then it came to me. Socks.

Not the sort Polly Oliver uses to -er, bolster her male impersonation, nor yet the shortened form of ‘Socrates’ with which Walter Judson tries to maintain a philosophic calm on the golf course.

To be precise, turning the heel when knitting a pair of socks. I have mentioned before how long it took me to figure out how to do it, even with a clear and simple pattern to hand. I’m surprised I persevered, given that I had no pressing need to knit socks, only a pressing desire, and that much shaken by repeated failure.

The problem was that I couldn’t see how what I was doing was going to produce the desired result. I couldn’t visualise how it all went together, so in the end I just had to carry on in faith that it would turn (pardon the pun) into a heel. And it did.

That’s a good metaphor for writing right there. You get your structure sorted (the pattern) and then you just keep going even if it looks like nothing on earth, trusting that it will come out the right shape if you just keep going.

So what’s your Master Metaphor? And do you know any good patterns for socks?

Tag: Master Metaphor

How is a Novel Like a Sock?

the Master Metaphor