Nina Schuyler, award-winning novelist and short story writer, will present “Making Metaphors and Other Stylish Moves” at the Tri-Valley Writers November 18, 2023, meeting. Metaphors are like magical pleasure pills that help the reader see the world anew. The critic James Wood said metaphors float a rival reality; it’s the entire imaginative process in one move. The philosopher José Ortega y Gasset called them tools for creation which God forgot inside one of His creations.
To create metaphors, we need a different way to view the world, moving away from either/or, the binary, and finding connections and similarities between seemingly disparate things. In this meeting, the primary focus will be trying out a unique strategy for making metaphors. We’ll look at published work by Annie Dillard, Saul Bellow, Amy Bloom, Rachel Cusk, Lauren Groff, and others and examine how they made metaphors. You’ll do in-class writing, creating metaphors that are original, powerful, vivid, and even funny.
To augment this exploration, we’ll also consider three ways to grow sentences so they can contain metaphors and much more style. By the end, you’ll have a much firmer grasp on how to make compelling, fresh metaphors and sentences that contain them.
Participants will
- develop an understanding of the power of metaphor
- gain strategies to create metaphors
- learn how to write original metaphors
- learn how to write sentences that can easily contain metaphors
- learn three techniques for writing sentences that invoke more style techniques.
Nina Schuyler teaches creative writing at the University of San Francisco and Stanford Continuing Studies. Her novel, Afterword, was published in May 2023 by Clash Books and named a favorite May book by Alta Journal and a favorite June book by Towne Center Books. Her short story collection, In This Ravishing World, won the W.S. Porter Prize for Short Story Collections and the Prism Prize for Climate Literature and will be published by Regal House Publishing in July 2024. Her novel, The Translator, won the Next Generation Indie Book for General Fiction and was a finalist for the William Saroyan International Writing Prize. Her nonfiction book, How to Write Stunning Sentences, is a bestseller. You can learn more at www.ninaschuyler.com and reach her through the following social media links: Instagram: ninaschuyler, Facebook: nina.schuyler, Twitter: Nina_Schuyler, and Linkedin: Nina-Schuyler.