I think in about half of the cases, metaphor is just how my mind works. I see the world in terms of relationships - how each things is connected to everything else. My mind is a lot more like this than normal people. Metaphors happen when my mind moves along those lines of connection. In "Looking for Alice," for example, I say that Johanna's ears had “gravity fields in them,” because that is how I see them. I’m not trying to be cute! For me, there is a connection between how she listens and how a gravity field affects things around it (and all of this also in my mind connects to fitness landscapes and search problems etc etc).

• So I guess metaphors are partly downstream of building a view of the world, where you have rich mental models of what things are and how they are connected.

But let’s talk about when I make metaphors consciously. It goes something like this:

• So what usually happens first is that I write something, and when I reread it, I'm not happy with it. The writing seems too flat, or I feel like the phrasing I used doesn't capture the feeling I have in mind. At those points, I usually reach for metaphor as a way to bring more life in.

• What this looks like in practice is that I stare into empty space for a minute or two while I very rapidly in my head try out 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 different metaphors, waiting for one to click and make me excited "yes!! that's what I mean".

  • I find that it's always better to get many ideas on the table and pick a good one rather than taking the first idea and trying to workshop it into something good. 

• When I say that it clicks in place, that's mostly an intuitive thing, but I think I can articulate a few of the criteria that I'm looking for. 

  • The further apart the things I compare are, the more interesting it is to me generally. So if I'm trying to come up with a metaphor for how a Talking Heads song sounds, I think it would be pretty boring to compare it to a fugue since that's a musical metaphor. I want metaphors to bridge domains. It's more interesting for me to compare a song to some concepts from . . . engineering or painting or scholastic philosophy from the 1100s.

  • There's something a bit jazzy about how it feels when these two notes that you didn't expect to hear close to each other resolve in a satisfying way.

  • And when I say that I want to have a certain distance, it doesn't only apply to the topic I'm making a metaphor about, but also to the context around a metaphor.

    • If we stick with the talking heads example: say the rest of that essay has a lot of jargon from engineering, then using an engineering metaphor here would feel less satisfying.

    • It's a bit like I'm doing the opposite of what a language model does. A language model plots the words you've said into an embedding space and then looks for words that are close to that point cloud in the embedding space. Whereas I am looking for points that are maximally far from that point cloud but still make sense.

• There is some literary theorist whose name I'm forgetting, who talks about thinginess. And that's important when it comes to metaphors. I need to give some context before I explain what thininess is.

  • The context: metaphors pull us away from the topic we're talking about. It points out underlying structural similarities between dissimilar things. (In a previous paragraph, for example, I made a connection between metaphors and embedding spaces, pointing out that there are some structural similarities between those domains.) And the problem with this is that it can make the writing feel a bit abstract and heady.

  • And this is where thinginess comes in. To not get stuck in that abstract space, you can compensate by making the metaphors very physical and thingy. You want to have some sticky blood on your metaphors, you want to feel it on your fingers. That is satisfying.

• Related to all of the above, you also want the metaphors to be somewhat novel. If you've read a similar metaphor before, it tends to make it feel less "thingy" and less alive and less jazz.

• As you practice making meatphors, you gradually build up a richer and richer library of metaphors that you have thought of and that you have seen in text that you have read. Then you try to compare the ideas that you have against that library so that you do not repeat yourself too much. When I go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in my head, a big reason why I discard the metaphors is that they bore me because they are so normal. You just have to keep going until you surface metaphors that are new and fresh and more deeply connected to your vision of the world.