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In this previous post I talked about the different kinds of metapors and how metaphors work principally. In todays post I’m going to go a bit further. I’m going to illustrate how to create metaphors using the “Connecting Idea” method. Once you’ve identified your connecting idea the metaphors should just tumble out. To get started you only two questions:

1. What characteristics does this idea have?

2. What else has those characteristics?

Let’s see this in action. I’m going to pick something to illustrate how the metaphors come tumbling out with just these two questions. I’ve picked the police as my subject. Now I ask myself, “what qualities do the cops have?” and just start listing the fragments.

protect

corrupt

peace keepers

abuse

power

control

We’ll start there. Now I ask myself, “what else has those characteristics?” Just take one of the words to start. I’ll take protect. Guns protect. So do houses, buildings, and bomb shelters. Clothing protects, raincoats, Sorrels, gloves. Let’s see what we have:

The police are the guns of society

The police are the bomb shelters of the city

A raincoat of police

I kind of like that last one. Let’s keep going. Corrupt. The Mob is corrupt. Dictatorships are corrupt. A computer virus corrupts a computer file.

The police are the mob of the city

The police are the dictators of society

A virus of police

Alright, one more. Let’s take power. Hurricanes have power. So do horses. Ferrari’s have power. The United States has power. Cannons, tanks, and explosions have power.

A hurricane of police

An explosion of police

The police are society’s cannons

See how many metaphors we’ve generated? And that was just from three of our words. There’s no limit to the number of ideas you can generate. I hope this illustration helps you on your way to building more meaningful and creative metaphor! Good luck!

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Hans Erik
Content Marketing Director
Hans@Next2Friends.com