Stuck in a Metaphor That You Can't Get Out Of

We closed yesterday's post as follows:

"As that tribune of anti-intellectualism Sarah Palin continues her book tour . . . we [roll our eyes] at the ever-apparent impulse not to mold the 'common clay' of our society into something great, but simply to keep massaging the amorphous blob, softening it up, letting its potential remain unrealized" (emphasis added).

Now, regardless of what you think of the prose (and we freely admit it's not our best work), we thought we'd share something about its composition.

The reasoning: We had mentioned "common clay" earlier in the post (quoting a line from "Blazing Saddles"), so we wanted to end the piece with the same metaphor, thereby providing the reader with a nice sense of completion--as of a journey ending with a return home. We also wanted to extend the "common clay" metaphor in an effort to remove somewhat the taint of cliche associated with that familiar trope.

The procedure: We cruised into the sentence easily enough: After all, what do people do with clay? They mold it--or, in this case, they fail to mold it. Not content to leave well enough alone, though, we wanted to extend the sentence, thereby (ideally) providing the sentence with some cumulative "build." We quickly realized, though, that we were in trouble.

The quandary: If the powers-that-be were not molding the common clay, what were they doing to it? For that matter, how many other things can you do to clay?

In the context of the post, the powers-that-be were patronizing their constituents and customers. But you can't really speak of "patronizing" clay. We considered simply throwing up our hands and ending like this:

". . . at the ever-apparent impulse not to mold the 'common clay' of our society into something great, but simply to keep patronizing the masses, basking in their ignorance. (Yes, we know the metaphor fell apart. Sue us.)"

But that would be a cop-out. We tell our students all the time that writing is difficult but that good writing is worth the effort. We felt a sense of professional obligation to at least try to make the metaphor work.

We don't think we succeeded.

What would have been better? Well, Emi Ha's comment contained the seeds of an elegant solution. She wrote: "Kind of like that stuff that was popular when we were kids--SLIME; it never amounted to much, it was gross, and it stained everything it touched." In other words, instead of focusing on what people were trying to do to the clay, we could have played with the substance of which the common folk are made. We might have found a more powerful ending.

Two lessons:

--Writing is more difficult than it looks. When something is easy for you to read, thank the writer who has expended great energy on making things as easily digestible for you as possible.

--Feedback and editing are invaluable. When you can't find your way out of a particularly tangled thicket of language, step back, breathe, and let someone else take a crack at it.