What is it about metaphors that makes them so vivid? The bite in the Apple logo at once conveys the garden of Eden, wisdom, crossing the lines of convention, and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
What's the fuss? It's just a little ol' apple. Yet it's very clandestine, mysterious, evocative, universal. So much more that our mythic brain resonates with than what's on the surface. I've read research that says that metaphors compared to any other writing engages both the left and right sides of the reader's brain simultaneously. Which also means it takes a bit more effort to process and makes a more impactful impression.
I know that my own poet's soul swoons in the face of a good symbol. I loved Dan Pink's line in A Whole New Mind, If a picture is worth a thousand words, a metaphor is worth a thousand pictures.
In the classic "How to Write a Book Proposal", author Michael Larsen talks about how to choose a book title - a critical link to sales. Equally good advice for an entire essence of a brand too. Larsen says, "As I said before, you'll know it when you hear it; you'll get goose bumps." I'm more kinetic, I know I've hit on The Idea when I feel it; a knowingness arises and there's no doubt. Until then it's back to the drawing board.
"When I worked at Bantam, the editors used to talk about a Little, Brown novel called Five Days. It didn't sell well, so when Bantam published the mass-market edition of the book, they changed the title to Five Nights. Five Days tells; Five Nights sells. This is a timeless example of what a title should be: evocative, intriguing, enticing, appealing more to the emotions than to the mind...
What's in a name? Plenty! A symbol or metaphor that captures the essence of your book can crystallize the meaning and structure of the book for you, the agent, the editor, the sales reps, the booksellers, and the book buyers. Let your imagination run wild and have fun thinking about all the possibilities." - How to Write A Book Proposal, by Michael Larsen
Give any poet the choice between Five Days and Five Nights - and it's not even a choice.
Basically poems are distilled, concentrated, potent forms of prose. Copy should be the same. The product too can be metaphorical. I know coders who look at the problem they are trying to solve in computer language from the framework of a metaphor. They envisage the real-world metaphor to apply first before writing a line. Is the security program best viewed as a lock, a vault, a fortress, a guarded community, etc. Is the user interface for an operating system like an office environment with files, inboxes, documents and post-its?
I'm working on the metaphor to describe one of my mutual inspiration partners, a Croatian-born artist and single mother of two, whom is having her first public showing in over twenty years this Mother's Day weekend in San Jose (rough draft of online invitation here).
It wasn't a simple task to distill my friend, Ruby Dosen, because like all of us, she's a complex multifaceted person: ah, what a travesty to leave so much out. Anyway, see if you can pick out the symbols yourself. (Based on feedback from men, we may change the title of the body of work, "Nature's Erotica" to "Nature's Emergence." People may be constrained by the term and not grasp that creation's erotica is everywhere.)
Here's another good example of the power of metaphor at play. This author suggests using nature as your inspiration source:
"I recently did a pitch to a very conservative company seeking to market to women suffering from substance abuse and eating disorders. The client made it clear they did not want their ads to feature depressed and distraught looking women. I knew that this market wouldn't respond to ads featuring happy, smiling women, so we began the search for a good metaphor.
Once again, Mother Nature came through with flying colors. I found a beautiful photo of an oyster, half opened to reveal its perfect white pearl. The outside of the oyster was craggy, hard and ugly (the way these women perceive themselves and their lives). The pearl inside was luminous (the way we wanted them to see themselves and their potential.) This simple image from nature launched a whole series of ideas around the concept that inside every troubled woman was a spot of beauty and value waiting to be revealed. Life is hard. You are beautiful. The client loved it! To this day, one of the company's owners refers to me as the man who brought them great pearls of wisdom." - "Creative by Nature", by Bob Kodzis, Create Magazine, Spring 2006
Practice: "I will often take a word or a poem or a story or an idea, and I try to let it live in me. I dream it, I daydream it, I let thoughts surface and I try not to push them down and away. I let my fingers type, sometimes ahead of my brain, and then I wonder where all that came from." - from "Practice Resurrection"
I often walk around the block, maybe to the park, with a slip of paper and pen and I note what leaps out at me. Could be external image like a California poppy or it could be a symbollic metaphor that instaneously lodges into my mind out of the blue. I wrote Ruby's online invitation flyer immediately after a twenty-minute walk. (Of course I've had many conversations with Ruby prior, but finding the coalescing theme was the intent of the walk.)
tags poetry metaphor art innovation brands advertising writing inspiration symbols myth creativity marketing
My highbrow argument goes something like "Because of Joy King and Steve Orenstein, silly!"
Posted by: DATING | May 12, 2006 at 02:32 AM