“To be a master of metaphor is the greatest thing by far,” said Aristotle. “It is the one thing that cannot be learned from others. And it is also a sign of genius.”
I believe that facility with metaphor is at the very heart of creativity. Yet when I introduce the subject in training workshops, there usually descends a look of apprehension, even fear, shortly followed by an apparently semi-hypnotic state, as though the mere mention of the term has induced a measure of psychic paralysis.
I wonder why this is so? In my own school days we were taught the meaning of metaphor alongside simile and analogy, as though defining them would in some mysterious way set free our ability to use them freely. Not so. It’s practice that counts.
In my old company, Synectics, we sidestepped the whole issue by talking about “excursions”, which seemed to me to be in practice a practical way of getting into metaphor without using the mesmerising term itself.
(Have you noticed how many suggestive metaphors exist in this brief piece alone?)
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