101 Reasons to Stop Writing

Similes, metaphors and allegories are the unholy Trinity of bad storytelling.

Somewhere in humanity’s distant past, a storyteller was recounting the tale of a skirmish between two warring tribes, embellishing details of a battle he didn’t witness. Elaborating on the strengths and prowess of his tribe, and the weakness and cowardice of their enemies, the storyteller struggled with his limited vocabulary to keep the story going, to turn a simple act of brutality into an epic tale that would be remembered.

In a moment of inspiration, the storyteller compared the leader of the tribe to a bear, large and powerful — and invented the simile. He said their enemies were wolves, vicious and predatory — creating the first metaphor. Cheered by his audience, he described the rest of the story as a battle between bears and wolves — and the allegory was born.

And in so doing, he doomed the future of storytelling to a constant struggle for imagery, a search for similes, metaphors and allegories that would make each story seem greater than those told before — and the simple skill of recounting events as they happened was lost.

It’s Like an Analogy

Similes, metaphors and allegories are the unholy Trinity of bad storytelling, the linguistic embodiment of the over-rated maxim Show, Don’t Tell. Collectively, they are more frequently abused than the exclamation point, the deus ex machina and the phrase "As you know". They can be used to brilliant effect, but more often than not they only exist to demonstrate the author’s inability to tell the story clearly.

Similes, metaphors and allegories are all essentially analogies: they serve to illustrate something unknown by comparing it to something known. But, like writers, they usually don’t work. This simple principle of description-by-comparison has been largely abandoned to a game of linguistic excess, where writers construct ever more outlandish and distracting imagery as if there was a merit badge for it (or, more accurately, to prove their literary cred to the critics in their writing group).

Similies and metaphors have their place, though: in 19^th Century Symbolist poetry. The worst of the trio is the Allegory, which has the power to ruin entire stories.

Allegory is not a Character in a Troma Movie

Allegory is when the entire story becomes a metaphor for something else — whether or not the author intended it as such. You’re probably familiar with the term from its most commonly-used phrase, "But it’s really an allegory for … ", usually followed by an unconvincing "Oh yeah, I knew that."

Allegories are written (or interpreted) because people have a hard time justifying the time it takes to read a book without deducing or ascribing a "deeper meaning". This is especially true of so-called "classic" works, which require more effort to read and thus should yield greater reward than a contemporary work. By the same token, writers create allegorical stories because they don’t want their work to be read and forgotten in an afternoon.

There are two kinds of allegories:

• those that pretentious writers build their stories around, and
• those that critics with nothing else to do insist on interpreting into stories.

There’s little we can do about the second group — there will always be a dialogue about the "deeper meaning", because English professors have to justify their tenure, and lit students their tuition, by endlessly re-analysing stories with newly-invented critical frameworks called Post- something — post-feminist, post-colonial, post-caring. The most an author can do is deny the bogus interpretations, as J.R.R. Tolkein did when people insisted that Lord of the Rings was an allegory of the Second World War, or revel in the infamy of competing interpretations, like Don McLean has since recording "American Pie".

But stories designed to be allegories are the scourge of literature, intent on making it impossible to enjoy a story without having discuss it afterwards to check if your interpretation is "right".

When Allegories Attack

There are really only two circumstances that warrant an allegorical story:

• When the author lives in, and is writing about, a repressive society that punishes direct criticism with censorship, imprisonment or worse; and
• When the author is one failed novel from being dumped by their publisher, and really needs to get shortlisted for a literary award this time.

It’s no wonder that some of the best allegorical stories are written during wartime, or in repressive or archly conservative societies, such as Orwell’s Animal Farm. The allegory is an essential tool in those conditions, both for communicating your meaning covertly to a receptive audience, and for deniability when the powers-that-be wise up and come knocking.

Outside those conditions, it’s a tool of literary pretension, deliberately obfuscating the meaning of a story in order to make your readers feel clever for having decoded it, to court critical and academic discussion, and to apply in advance for Penguin Classics reprint rights. It’s also a convenient way of excusing the fact that the story doesn’t stand up on its own.

But What Does It Mean?

That’s the eternal question. In every allegorical story, there is a conflict between the surface story and the deeper meaning. The best ones are entertaining enough on the surface to be enjoyed even if the reader never perceives the allegory. It’s possible to enjoy Tolstoy’s War and Peace, for example, as an epic tale of a nation in conflict, without understanding that it’s really an allegory for life in high school.

The Holy Grail of allegorical writing is timing the "aha" moment, when the reader discovers the deeper meaning, for as close to the end of the story as possible. For example, the final sequence of Close Encounters of the Third Kind is very powerful when you realise the whole movie, culminating in Richard Dreyfus’ decision to leave with the aliens, is an allegory for the moral dilemma of deadbeat dads.

The problem, though, is that allegories almost never achieve this. Either the allegory is so obscure that you only discover it when the pseudo-intellectual husband of your wife’s friend mocks you at dinner for not having figured it out (after he read it in a review), or the allegory is so blatantly signposted that the surface story reads like its own Cliff Notes.

This is the essential problem with allegories: the surface story is usually dull or even meaningless without understanding the allegory, and once you understand the allegory, it’s boring and predictable.

When Good Allegories Go Bad

All allegories are parables, or satires — but in the information-rich 21^st Century, allegories are preaching, or satirising, to the converted. The "deeper meaning" of your allegory has almost certainly already been discussed ad infinitum on talk shows, blogs and message boards, and if your readers don’t understand the idea already, they won’t get it from your story.

In Western countries at least, there is just no need for allegory anymore — when the moronic antics and draconian douchebaggery of the sitting US President are daily fodder for bloggers, talking-head pundits and comedians alike, what is there that you can’t say, except allegorically?

The only thing worse than a story that relies on allegory is a one with no deeper meaning at all. The allegory then becomes an exploration of why a reader would want to waste their time.