Dear fellow writer,
Welcome back to Swordcraft, my new series of short, sharp weekly videos for writers who want to hone their wordcraft, one snippet at a time.
Today’s swordsnip is the fifth in a 6-part sequence for paid subscribers called Research Bites, which offers bite-sized summaries of research articles on academic and professional writing.
This week we’ll take a quick look at my book chapter “Snowflakes, Splinters, and Cobblestones: Metaphors for Writing,” which appeared in a lovely 2019 book called Innovations in Narrative and Metaphor: Methodologies and Practices, edited by Sandy Farquhar and Esther Fitzpatrick.
I’ve been fascinated for a long time by the metaphors that writers employ, often unconsciously, to describe the ups and downs of their writing practice. For this chapter, I undertook a taxonomic analysis of 335 such metaphors, collected from a variety of sources, and developed a series of exercises and prompts to help writers “re-story” their writing process using complex, multi-layered metaphors of challenge, resilience, and change.
Paid subscribers can find a downloadable pdf of the chapter at the bottom of this post.
Kia pai tō koutou rā (have a great day) – and keep on writing!
Helen
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Books on writing by Helen Sword
