11 Classic Metaphors That Will Inspire You to

Write

Starting out as a writer can be difficult at first.  You’ll need to learn to master proper writing technique. Aside from that you will also need add both flair and substance into your work. This can take years to develop, and you may get tired in the long run. One effective way to add both flair and substance to your work, is to learn how to use and write metaphors.

What are metaphors? They are figures of speech that compare two things that are not alike, yet share something in common. Writing metaphors are a great way to hone your writing skills, and can be used in a myriad of writing forms that range from story writing to poetry writing. As a way to get you started, here are 11 classic metaphors that will inspire you to write.

1. “Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.”

-Neil Gaiman

2. “I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.”

– Gustave Flaubert

3. I’m a Little Pencil in the Hand of a Writing God…

-Mother Teresa

4. “Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.”

-William Wordsworth

5. All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.

-William Shakespeare

6. “Your very flesh shall be a great poem”

-Walt Whitman

7. “My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations.”

– John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

8. “Life’ wrote a friend of mine, ‘is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.”

– E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

9. All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.

Thinking is always the stumbling stone to poetry.

-Khalil Gibran

10. These poems do not live: it’s a sad diagnosis. They grew their toes and fingers well enough, their little foreheads bulged with concentration. If they missed out on walking about like people. It wasn’t for any lack of mother-love.

-Sylvia Plath

11. Bobby Holloway says my imagination is a three-hundred-ring circus. Currently, I was in ring two hundred and ninety-nine, with elephants dancing and clowns cartwheeling and tigers leaping through rings of fire. The time had come to step back, leave the main tent, go buy some popcorn and a Coke, bliss out, cool down.

-Dean Koontz

Conclusion:

Writing metaphors are a fun way to improve your writing skills, while learning how to incorporate expressive words into your work. With these classic examples of metaphor’s you’ll not only know how to properly make them, you’ll be inspired to write even more.