By Elizabeth Lyon
In my work with writers over the years, I’ve come to believe that mastering plotting is far easier than mastering characterization. Creating depth of character means, for the writer, diving into the mostly uncharted waters of the psyche, the soul, and the spirit.
Recently, I led one of my three critique groups on a guided tour of these waters. I gave the assignment of discovering and developing a metaphor for the protagonist or other point-of-view characters. One of my dictionaries defines metaphor as: “A figure of speech in which a term is transferred from the object it ordinarily designates to an object it may designate only by implicit comparison or analogy.” The dictionary goes on to give the example, “the evening of my life.” We use metaphors in daily speech all of the time. Don’t believe me? Dog days. Buried under a mountain of paperwork. (more…)
