Wavedash

Ahh, New York Magazine. In Friday’s article The Low Road Warrior you find yourself getting swept up by a whirlwind of cries of political mudslinging. Be sure to head over to A Candid World if you want to cry foul about or heap praise upon the McCain Campaign’s new tact (and congratulate Ames on the sparkling new domain name). This being – in part – a writing blog, I feel compelled to point to something far more sinister than mere Presidential politics:

Geez, look at all of those metaphors!

Until last week, it was an open question which of these visions of McCain bore a closer relation to reality. But with the weeklong string of attacks uncorked by the Arizona senator and his people during Obama’s trip abroad and in its aftermath—some brutal, some mocking, but all personal and focused on Obama’s character—we now have an inkling of just how deep in the mud McCain and his people are willing to wallow in order to win in November: right up to their Republican eyeballs.

Thanks to some ambitious punctuation, the second sentence boasts at least 7 metaphors. 8 if you don’t count “deep in the mud” and “wallow” as the same image. The metaphor is such an important hub for our cognitive functions that its evil twin, the mixed metaphor, turns its head at every turn, often leading to stylistic train wrecks, especially in journalism.

After all, in fiction, a good editor will belittle a writer for mixing his metaphors. “Ha ha! McCain uncorked a string? Since when do you bottle string?” A journalist, however, recognizes the necessary lubrication a metaphor provides. The Economist Style Guide has an entire section dedicated to the metaphor, and it is telling that the writer acknowledges, but does not condemn, the overuse of tired phrases. The Economist’s advice is, simply, to be aware of what you’re saying, so you don’t drop a doozy like “This is an off-the-wall programme with a track record of cutting-edge humour, but on this occasion we appear to have overstepped the mark.”

Be precise! Or, as Zapp Branigan would say, “If we can hit this bullseye, all the dominos will fall like a house of cards…checkmate!”

You can’t heap blame the poor writer, though. Steven Pinker writes extensively about the role of metaphors in thought. If you find yourself delighted by cognitive linguistics, I highly recommend Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought. He spends hundreds of pages putting language under the microscope, examining it as every writer should: as a window to the mind’s machinery.

As for metaphors, it all boils down to one thing. Take them with a grain of salt.

1. Have faith in your coworkers, but don’t trust them. At a creative agency, you’re surrounded by talented people. Designers, writers, account executives, traffic coordinators and the rest. In a perfect world, everyone in your chain of command is smart, capable and insightful. But, as a writer, whenever I send corrections back to the designer it is my responsibility to make sure those corrections were made.
   
   More importantly, I have to check that no additional mistakes (extra commas, spaces, etc) found their way in as a result of the changes. If it goes to the client with a mistake the designer made based on my corrections, it’s my fault. Not the designer’s.

2. Looking stupid is bad. Who knew? It seems like 2/3rds of a creative agency’s life is spent trying to not look dumb. This goes well beyond making sure the client doesn’t look dumb. A piece may go to press with zero mistakes, but if the client had to point out three paltry errors to get it there, it reflects poorly on you.Even asking for clarification on multiple occasions gives the impression that you don’t know what you’re doing. Ask too many questions about their preferred style, or whether something would violate brand guidelines, and the client starts to get DIY syndrome. You must know the brand guidelines well enough in advance that you don’t have to pepper the account executive with questions.After all, the client hired you so that they don’t have to worry about the details.In life, this comes down to respect. You should never be afraid to ask questions, especially if there is a risk that you’ll get it wrong. But there’s a thin line between appearing careful and appearing clueless. If you’re always asking your boss how to open your email attachments, he or she will have a hard time considering you for a promotion.
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Have you ever noticed that:

When you nail a point, it’s the same as when you hit the nail on the head? Both imply precision, even though nailing a picture to the wall is much different than squarely hitting a nail once. Congrats on not hitting your thumb, I guess.

Then you can hammer something. If you nail a question, you got it right without difficulty. If you hammer your point home, you engaged in rhetorical brutality, pushing your position over and over until you succeeded. But how often do you use a hammer without a nail? Shouldn’t their respective metaphors be the same?

If a baseball player nailed the ball, the phrase implies he swung the bat accurately and skillfully. If he hammered the ball, he struck it with a powerful swing.

It goes to show how two tools that work together for a single purpose (to attach one thing to another thing) can take on different connotations. Once that divide occurs, the metaphors begin to diverge even further. After all, what would you think if someone said, “Man, I got so nailed last night, and then I hammered this chick?”

“Show, don’t tell.”

At first pass, it’s the solution to 90% of bad writing. It’s such a vague, catch-all instruction that if you’re in a writer’s workshop, you can prove you critiqued your peers by writing “show, don’t tell!” all over their stories. Strident red letters work best. I prefer to replace the “don’t” with “not,” so I can refer to the phrase as SnotT. That acronym should tell you how highly I regard the overused criticism.

“Show, don’t tell” is shorthand for Immerse your reader in the story through detail. Turn your nouns, adjectives and verbs into people, emotions and actions. In Science Fiction, a particularly good piece of SnotT is called an eye kick, referring to vivid imagery that shocks the reader with just how futuristic the future is.

SnotT is absolutely necessary, and you should forget it exists.

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