A metaphor needs two halves
An effective metaphor needs both a sensory connection and a logical one; with only one of the two, it reads as forced.
On this page
When you reach for a metaphor, the test I teach — I take it from the poet Ocean Vuong — is that it needs both a sensory connector (a shared texture, sound, or sight) and a logical connector between the two images.
The two connectors
A figure with only the sensory half collapses. The failing example, coined in a workshop discussion of George Saunders's essay "The Braindead Megaphone," was "the media is a moldy banana": it has the sensory half — something rotten — but no logic linking media to fruit.
A metaphor is a detour that has to lead somewhere that alters the meaning.
Ocean Vuong · On the craft of metaphor
A detour that has to pay off
The detour earns its keep only if it changes how you understand the thing. This is also why an allusion is a metaphor's heavier cousin — a borrowed text has to do structural work, not merely sound grand.
"The media is a moldy banana" has the smell but not the sense.
Why the body makes the metaphor
The reason a good metaphor has to come from a body is that metaphor is how embodied brains make sense of the world — Lakoff and Johnson show it in everyday phrases like "you attacked my argument" or "time is running out," each a window onto how we experience things physically. That's why AI's metaphors read as uncanny: formally correct, but a few degrees off, because the machine has never experienced anything — it's the "how do you do, fellow humans" of figurative language. The metaphors that occur to you — a mother and daughter "as close as an orange to its navel," a garbage collector's "disco rice" for the maggots in the trash — are visceral because they come from lived experience, and they speak the same bodily language as your reader.
Try it
- For any metaphor, name the sensory link and the logical link out loud; if you can't name both, cut it.
- Prefer a comparison that alters the reader's understanding over one that merely decorates.
- Keep the camera on — a metaphor is one more way to make the abstract concrete, not a way to escape it.
Drawn from
- William, The 5 Writing Skills A.I. Will Never Replace (Writer Science, 2026) — embodied metaphor, and why AI's metaphors are uncanny.
- George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (1980) — metaphor as the ground of everyday thought. Amazon →