The Working Metaphors of Novel Writing

Ingrid Rojas Conteras speaks to Naima Coster, Alexandra Kleeman, R. O. Kwon, Laura van den Berg, and Bryan Washington about the language they use to describe writing novels.

When I was writing my first novel, Fruit of the Drunken Tree, in order to uphold the yearslong effort of creating something from nothing, putting words on the page, revising, cutting, expanding, I came up with a working metaphor.

It grew naturally from my journaling about the novel-writing process. One day I was complaining about how hard it was to get to the depth of emotion and truth my novel required, and then I began to describe myself as a free diver, afloat in the ocean, flanked on all sides by nothing but a sea horizon. The landscape was beautiful, cerulean, and deadly. Divers have to increase their lung capacity in order to free dive, packing their lungs with air so they can descend as deeply as possible for as long as possible. So, every day after, as I sat down to write, I imagined myself taking in breath, enough to last me for hours. Then I’d dive as deep as I could go.

Every day, I aimed for somewhere deeper. What I wanted to find lay somewhere down there, near the seafloor, where the pressure was high and things were a little eerie and surreal, and it was difficult to get to. But I had to go look for it.

This became the personal language I used with myself so that I could earn the draft. I know that other writers, too, invent language, working metaphors like mine to establish relationships with writing novels. What I’ve noticed over the years is that the contextual language, image, or metaphor both expresses how hard it is to sustain the marathon effort of writing a novel and provides an image through which the writer feels called to show up and do the work. I got curious about what these metaphors might look like for other writers, and so I began to ask around.

R. O. Kwon, author of that beautiful fuse of a novel The Incendiaries, shared that her metaphor has to do with excavating. “Writing feels to me more akin to digging than inventing. I almost believe the book preexists, and it’s my job to slowly dig my way toward it,” she told me. Imagining this metaphor, I can see how a writer might feel much less pressure when the work already exists, in a way, and hope is built into the process. All one has to do is open holes until the work is located.

Alexandra Kleeman—whose second novel, Something New Under the Sun, is as full of dark humor and wit and surreal horror as her first—told me that, to her, writing a novel is like excavation too. Except she imagines that she’s excavating a large subterranean skeleton. “For so long it feels like you’re just moving dirt, you feel the exertion of every gesture, it all feels like it has a sort of sameness,” she said. “And then you start seeing the little bits of shape, real details that feel lively and precise, the things you know to be true in your story! And then you’re digging with purpose until you can see the shape of the whole thing.” There’s hope—which, in writer’s terms, is maybe purpose—built into Kleeman’s metaphor as well.

Naima Coster, author of the equally moving and wonderfully bright novels Halsey Street and What’s Mine and Yours, doesn’t have a metaphor of her own, but she does think of one she received from Stacey D’Erasmo. As a student, Coster expressed uncertainty about how much she didn’t understand about her book, and D’Erasmo responded with a metaphor. “She told me that writing a novel is like walking into the ocean, and you keep getting knocked back by waves to the shore,” Coster recalled. “But as you get farther out, the waves become calmer. I love this idea—that the setbacks are just a part of the process and once you’re deep enough in the work, you can settle in. You’re in the ocean.”

Persevering in the face of a work that is at times adversarial is also present in Laura van den Berg’s working image. Author of five works of fiction and two novels, her latest, The Third Hotel—top-shelf among works that delve into dark surreality—borrows from her experience with boxing. Van den Berg shared with me a critical boxing lesson: You have to move toward the thing that scares you in order to defuse the threat. To want to escape a threat is natural, but sometimes putting space between you and the person who is trying to hurt you only gives your opponent more power.

“Strange as it may sound, I sometimes hold this image in mind when writing a novel,” she said. “Inevitably, I’ll reach a crossroads where a choice or possibility—usually the necessary one—feels scary or impossible. But I know that I need to move closer to the risk in order to understand it and to really see what’s there. In these moments, I try to remember how it feels to be afraid in the ring, and how a kind of grace can emerge from closing the distance between myself and the other person as opposed to increasing it. Because it is this closeness where meaningful work happens. And the more I avoid the risk, the more space I’m giving that—usually imaginary—feeling of impossibility to grow.”

I feel a contact high just from thinking about this metaphor. And there’s a kinship to all these images, a conceptual language that stabilizes the high anxiety of writing a novel, where so much is unknown and where we often risk ourselves. In my own metaphor, as in the others collected here, the exertion is met with a kind of quiet purpose, toward a book that is waiting to be found out, if only we can confront what scares us.

My writing metaphor has shifted through the years. In the beginning, it spoke to me about how beautiful and terrifying the process was. As time passed, it shifted and became about sustaining concentration, going deeper and deeper into myself, to a place where the story lived in the crux of complication.

My writing metaphor has shifted through the years.

I used my metaphor to teach myself to remain present. One of the struggles I faced early on (and which still comes and goes) has to do with a mounting anxiety about doing well and ruining the work or doing badly and ruining the work—worries that are located somewhere in the future or somewhere in the past. Sometimes I think of holding my breath while diving as a reminder to stay present, to maintain the focus and presence of mind necessary to write. Other days, my metaphor reminds me that I will go deep into what is terrifying, the part of the ocean where there is no light, to find what I seek.

Bryan Washington, whose debut novel Memorial published in 2020 and might be the most gorgeous and sparse prose you ever read, doesn’t necessarily think about writing in metaphors. He shared that he thinks about it as akin to having a conversation with himself and trying to think through a series of related questions.

“I’m not necessarily interested in answering the question(s). And I rarely ever do,” he said. “But uncovering new tangents, throughlines, and connections that further my understanding of the possibilities surrounding the questions themselves (‘What is home?’ ‘What forms can family take?’ ‘What does it mean to be okay, and how can we convince ourselves that we are enough?’) are what bring me value. I’ve learned (gradually, somewhat begrudgingly) to be alright with not having certainty or codified conclusions, but searching for possibilities inside of that uncertainty is what brings me joy in the writing.” This is a framing language I use to teach novels too. Asking through storytelling, instead of telling, makes the whole endeavor of writing more possible.

In writing a novel, there will be an image, a metaphor, or a framing door through which it will be easier to enter the text. Whatever working language or metaphor a writer comes up with must serve the writing itself, and it often seems to grow from the writer’s experience of the work. I find this language so beautiful to hear and learn about because we may write alone, but we share the process.