While writing an article, report or book, you're more than likely to need a metaphor.
In fact, you may need at least a dozen. The problem with metaphors is that they're usually very predictable.
How do you take a “boring method” and make a metaphor quite exciting?
Let's find out.
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Rerelease: Three “Slightly Boring” Ways To Create Metaphors For Your Articles
Original: Three “Slightly Boring” Ways To Create Metaphors For Your Articles
How do you write a memorable metaphor?
Usually, it's an everyday event—with a slight twist. This twist is usually a surprise. The surprise can be a u-turn, a new fact, or something you're not expecting. At other times, it's something you're expecting, but feels new in the context.
Let's take some examples.
Example 1: Something you're not expecting.
E.g. Imagine a 1000 piece puzzle. To take on the 1000 piece puzzle, you need to know what it looks like in a completed form. Then, slowly, and systematically, you are able to put the pieces together. Even with the completed version, it's a difficult process working out what goes where.
Now imagine a 1000 piece puzzle with just fifty extra pieces. Those pieces don't fit anywhere, but they're just enough to cause an enormous amount of chaos.
Life is like that thousand piece puzzle. You have a thousand things to do. However, every now and then another fift random pieces are added to your day, week or month. What seems complicated in the first place, has now turned quite chaotic.
This is what adults call “stress”: a situation that is challenging that goes completely haywire. However, what if we looked at stress a different way?
What did we see in Example 1?
1- There's a boring story: solving a jigsaw puzzle.
2- There's a tiny tweak, in the sense it's a 1000 piece puzzle.
3- You've added fifty random pieces that don't fit anywhere (something that's not expected).
Example 2: A U-turn.
Imagine you were on a weight-reduction diet that worked way beyond your wildest imagination.
You were told that with the diet, you'd lose about ½ a kilo per week. Instead, in the first week, you lose two kilos. As the weeks pass, it looks like this:
Week 1: 2 kilos down.
Week 2: 2 more kilos down.
Week 3; 2 more kilos.
Week 4: Oh, yes, another two kilos.
You're now already at the lowest weight you need to be, but should we go on?
Would it make sense to lose another 8 kilos for the next month, followed by yet another 8? If you were to keep at that rate of weight loss, it would be considered problematic. To have “success” is a good thing, but at some point, that success turns toxic.
This is how a lot of entrepreneurs go about their life. They need a starting point of success. They also need a continuation of that success. However, what they're trained to adopt is a form of “toxic success”.
What did we see in Example 2?
1- There's a boring story: losing weight.
2- There's a tiny tweak, in the sense it's a chunky 2 kilos a week.
3- You've turned back and said “endless success is toxic” (it's a u-turn, because what was good is now something that has to stop)
Example 3: Something you're expecting, but feels new in the context.
Imagine you put seven red bags on a plane.
When you get off on the other side, you're expecting the bags to show up. The first red bag rolls off and you take it off the conveyor belt. Then the second, the third and the fourth. There's a green bag, a polka dot bags, some cardboard boxes, and there it is: the fifth and sixth bag.
So when do you leave the airport?
You leave when you have all seven red bags. If even one bag is missing, you are confused as to what action to take next. This kind of confusion is similar to what happens when clients are buying a product or service.
They have seven issues that need to be considered, and if you cover six and leave just one, the clients stop short. They're confused.
This is why you need to know exactly. what the bags are, so that instead of leaving your clients confused, they move to the next stage. Those seven red bags are what's described in the book called “The Brain Audit“. It's time to find out more about every one of those bags and avoid the confusion.
What did we see in Example 3?
1- There's a boring story: bags coming off after a flight has landed.
2- There's a tiny tweak: the last bag goes missing.
3- However, nothing is unusual in the story.
What's unusual is the way the story is told, including the addition of the “polka dot bags, the cardboard boxes” etc. The story feels like a story. Then when the bag ends up missing, we don't dwell on the story. Instead, we jump to The Brain Audit and how a client is also confused when one bag is missing.
Bonus Example:
Imagine you walk into a room and there's a chair. You sit on it, you stand up. You sit down again, then you stand up. You sit on it a third time. Then you stand up.
How many of us were expecting the chair to break?
The reason why chairs don't seem to break is because they're built with some sort of science in mind. Despite all of us being different weights, we don't test a chair before sit on it, because we know it will work as it should.
There's nothing wrong with testing the chair repeatedly, but the result is consistent. It stands up because there's a logic behind how it has been built.
That kind of logic also helps when you're creating a metaphor. You don't need to come up with metaphors and endlessly test them to see if they work. Instead, what you need is a system—a science—and you can create an almost endless number of metaphors whenever you choose to do so.
Let's find out the simple science behind memorable metaphors.
What did we see in the bonus example?
1- There's a story—an unremarkable story—of sitting on a chair.
2- What makes the story slightly new is that you're sitting on it and getting up. You continue to do this action repeatedly. It's this slight deviation from the normal that makes the metaphor curious.
P.S. Do you have a question on article writing? Email me, and I will reply.
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