Cooking, Mining, Gardening, Hunting: Metaphorical Stories Writers Tell About Their Composing Processes
Title:
Cooking, Mining, Gardening, Hunting: Metaphorical Stories Writers Tell About Their Composing Processes
Author:
Tomlinson, Barbara
Appeared in:
Metaphor and symbol
Paging:
Volume 1 (1986) nr. 1 pages 57-79
Year:
1986-03-01
Contents:
This article attempts to describe several figurative stories that professional writers use in talking about their composing and to note some of the salient features and implicit relationships that each story selects from the ambiguous, complex reality of the writing process. Drawing from comments made in over 2,000 published interviews, I focus on four metaphorical stories about the writing process, all stories in which writers compare their composing to other processes: cooking, mining, gardening, hunting. In turn, for each story I provide illustrative instances and indicate how the story treats the active/passive point of tension in interpreting the writing process. Then I suggest how the writing process and the process to which it is compared may be similar, how the story emphasizes and suppresses aspects of the writing process, and how the story is congruent with and is reinforced by some other metaphorical patterns common in our culture and in the writers' commentary. Subsequently, I compare the four stories across a number of dimensions to demonstrate the diversity of their views about composing and some of its consequences.
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