Buffalo Flats, Ep. 12: Language and Metaphor
Throughout Buffalo Flats, Martine Leavitt uses rich language and evocative metaphors. We break down how and why she uses specific language and metaphors, and to what effect. We also talk about how to decide what language and metaphors to use in your own work.
Links:
KidLit Craft post on language and metaphor in Full Cicada Moon by Marilyn Hilton
KidLit Craft post on metaphors in Partly Cloudy by Tanita S. Davis
The KidLit Craft Podcast is hosted by Anne-Marie Strohman and Erin Nuttall.
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Transcript:
[00:00:00] Erin Nuttall: I know, I know. I have goosebumps.
[Music intro]
[00:00:06] Anne-Marie Strohman: Welcome to episode 12 of the Kid Lit Craft Podcast. This season we're taking a deep dive into the YA novel Buffalo Flats by Martine Leavitt. Today we're focusing on metaphor and language. I am Anne-Marie Strohman and I write for children and young adults, everything from picture books to YA, and also short stories for adults.
[00:00:00] Erin Nuttall: Hi, I am Erin Nuttall, and I write for children and young adults as well, focusing mostly on young adults.
[00:00:36] Anne-Marie Strohman: On Kid Lit Craft, we take a look at mentor texts to discover the mechanics of how writers do what they do so we can apply it to our own writing.
[00:00:45] Erin Nuttall: This season we have taken the mentor text of Martine Leavitt's Buffalo Flats, as Anne-Marie mentioned. It is about Rebecca Leavitt, who is a teen in Canada's Northwest Territories in the late 1800s, and Rebecca wants more than anything to own her own piece of land. Maybe a little romance too.
[00:01:07] Anne-Marie Strohman: So let's start with vocabulary. Erin, I see here that the first word you're gonna define is language. I think I know what it is, but give us your definition.
[00:01:16] Erin Nuttall: I put it in as a vocabulary word because I wanted to define it. I wanted people to know what is we're talking about. Language is the specific words used in a specific order to create beautiful sentences, paragraphs, or scenes. And you could switch out beautiful to moving or strong or potent. The descriptor can change, but you're choosing words to go in a certain order to create a certain mood on sentence level, paragraph level, and scene level.
[00:01:50] Anne-Marie Strohman: Today we'll be looking specifically at the device of a metaphor. So what are metaphors and also what does it mean to extend a metaphor?
[00:02:00] Erin Nuttall: Okay, so a metaphor describes an object or an action in a way that isn't literally true, but helps explain an idea by making a comparison. So like if you told your kid your bedroom is a dump, or you have a heart of gold. Or the snow is a blanket. Those are all real easy and clear metaphors. If your kid's room is a dump, I'm sure you can picture that right now. You know what that means.
[00:02:27] Anne-Marie Strohman: So, so it's taking something that you don't know something about and using something you do to make that connection. So you have a bedroom, you wanna show something about that bedroom. And by comparing it to a dump, which we know what a dump looks like, it's gonna help us see that bedroom in a really economical way.
[00:02:48] Erin Nuttall: And frequently an emotional shortcut way. Dumps are not places people wanna be.
[00:02:55] Anne-Marie Strohman: Tell us about extended metaphors then.
[00:02:57] Erin Nuttall: Okay. So with an extended metaphor, sometimes it's called a conceit or a sustained metaphor, but it's all the same idea and it's the use of a single metaphor at length. It's a metaphor that shows up in multiple scenes throughout the story. Usually it's related to the theme of the book or the story.
[00:03:16] Anne-Marie Strohman: We’re gonna look at a number of instances where Martine uses especially compelling metaphors. So, Erin, start us off with a callback to our, two episodes ago, historical feminism.
[00:03:29] Erin Nuttall: Right. So we have Rebecca's mom and her two sisters-in-law, and they are making a point that their husbands need to interfere in a case of domestic violence and the husbands are reluctant to do so, reluctant to step out of bounds. So the women go and stay in the barn and this is a description that Martine writes.
“The barn was filled with heavy and sharp things of men, the chains and leathers that bound the horses to their whims, the shovels and spikes and plow blades and saws, everything meant to tame or conquer. And among all that in a stall, the floor of it covered in fresh hay, was her mother, soft and clean and unconquerable, and her sisters-in-law at Mother's Feet, like ladies in waiting.”
So there's a lot in there. And at first I wanna just talk about, if we go to the language that she uses there's a lot of alliteration with like the plural of chains, leathers, like there's a lot of… sharp chains, leathers, horses, whims, shovels, spikes, blades, saws, like there's a lot of that s sound going on.
We also have barn and bound and blades, so we have an— another one. So there's a lot of alliteration, but there's lot of visual things, chains and leathers. And what do they do? They bind. They bound the horses to their whims. And then what is Mother doing? She's soft and clean and unconquerable, so she's not going to be bound to their whims.
So we have that. And then we also have the sisters-in-law sitting at Mother's feet, like ladies and waiting. So Mother is the queen and she's sitting in this place. Like the contrast between those two things really drives home the metaphor.
[00:05:29] Anne-Marie Strohman: So let's go ahead and move right on to some other examples of metaphor and then I wanna talk about Martine's metaphor use in general here. So we've talked a lot about land and how important it's to Rebecca. Any metaphors around land?
[00:05:42] Erin Nuttall: Oh my goodness, there are so many. It was really hard to pick. If you even go back to, like, our beautiful sentences, I think probably at least 60 or 70% of those are about the land. But here's one in particular.
“The mountains glowed as if they swallowed the moon. It was one of those days that made you take the weather's tantrums in benign acceptance in the hope of another day like this.”
So there's a lot of beautiful imagery in that, the mountains glowing, and especially if you've seen mountains do this as well, but even if you haven't, it's easy to picture because of the word choice. The mountains glowed as if they swallowed the moon.
And then in recognition, Rebecca shows that she understands that the land isn't always easy, and I think that's actually partly why she loves it so much because she says “it was one of those days that made you take the weather's tantrums in benign acceptance and hope of another day like this.” So all the terrible weather is worth it for this day.
[00:06:49] Anne-Marie Strohman: We get that nice personification of the weather with the verb tantrums there.
[00:06:54] Erin Nuttall: Ooh. Yes, that is true.
[00:06:56] Anne-Marie Strohman: And I love the construction as if. I actually have to go back in my own manuscripts and cut some of them 'cause I have too many. But I tend to use that in terms of emotion. She felt as if, and then a metaphor after that. And Martine uses metaphors to describe emotions a lot. So lay at least one of 'em on us.
[00:07:19] Erin Nuttall: Okay, so after the crisis and Mother shoots a man, Father lies to get her free, there's a lot of things going on for Rebecca, and we know that Rebecca has long seen her parents as the stability in her life. And then also the mountains: what's more steadfast than the mountains, right?
So here we have, she says, “Mother had shot a man, Father had lied, and yet somehow they were Samuel and Eliza Leavitt still. Rebecca felt the mountains had been tipped upside down, balancing on their snowy tips, their roots floating up, like ribbons toward the clouds. It was not such a bad feeling.”
The imagery of the sentence. Describes Rebecca's emotions so perfectly. If you think Father and Mother are the pinnacle of good people for Rebecca and the mountains are the pinnacle of security and stability. And then we think about the mountains. I will say I have never once thought of mountains having roots, let alone that they float up like ribbons. And again, we have language that's really beautiful here and we have different ideas like mountains having ribbon-like roots, but then it's not such a bad feeling, so we also understand that while it's unsettling to her, she also was gaining a deeper appreciation for what happened.
[00:08:53] Anne-Marie Strohman: There's so many layers to that. There, it's like a metaphor sandwich, right? Like there's many layers here. Usually you're told don't mix your metaphors but here she layers them so carefully. We have the mountain upside down balancing, which gives us that precarious feeling. And then mountains having roots is also…Mountain as tree, kind of a metaphor in itself. And then the roots are floating up like ribbons toward the clouds. So there's another metaphor layered on top of that,
[00:09:23] Erin Nuttall: Ribbons are like ephemeral things, right? And they're like the opposite.
[00:09:28] Anne-Marie Strohman: And happy.
[00:09:30] Erin Nuttall: And yes.
[00:09:30] Anne-Marie Strohman: And so a lot of times when you think about an extended metaphor, being a longer passage, comparing a person's feeling to say a storm. There's a great example I love to use from the book, Lolo's Light, by Liz Garten Scanlan, and she is feeling absolutely unmoored, to be in that storm metaphor. She is the wooden boat in this raging storm. And it's a long paragraph that's just about storm and this one particular feeling. And here we have this extension by having a longer sentence with these mountains kind of sitting with that image, but then also layering additional metaphors on top of it.
And as you mentioned, the ribbons are a positive image, they're light, they're ephemeral. Something that like roots, we think of as grounding, right? And now they're floating up. They're not grounding, but they're creating wonder too.
[00:10:26] Erin Nuttall: Ooh. I like that image, creating wonder.
[00:10:27] Anne-Marie Strohman: Magic. Magic, Martine.
[00:10:30] Erin Nuttall: Her, her skills.
[00:10:33] Anne-Marie Strohman: Okay, I said we were gonna go quickly through these, and I lied, but let's look at some other metaphors around light. There are kinda a lot.
[00:10:43] Erin Nuttall: So, yes, if we're going to look at an extended metaphor in this, the biggest one is light. In that first scene where Rebecca has her sit on the tour with God there is a lot of light. She is with God, the light is strong and it glows up. And then after they part company, and we talked about this earlier on, that the mountains snuff out the light. Right? So we have that. And then we have it again. When she sees home she sees light again. So we have this idea just in pages two and three of God bringing the light, when he leaves, the light leaves with him, and then when she makes it home, she gets the light again.
There's that one, one little piece, and then we frequently have light playing on nature. But we also have light when she and Coby kiss.
We read this before, but I'm gonna read it anyway 'cause it was just so great.. So Coby had asked her earlier if he could kiss her, and she didn't know what to say, so she didn't say anything, so he didn't kiss her.
So we've been waiting for this kiss, and finally she says, “‘Yes, please.’ He looked at her. ‘I mean to the kiss,’ she said. ‘Yes, please.’ Then his mouth was on hers, and right then and there, she and Coby invented kissing. He kissed her and kissed her again, and she let him and let him. Whatever he wanted the answer was yes. Her spine bloomed into flame until all that was left was light on bone.”
So now we have another metaphor of light with her and Coby and that amazing kiss. But the most beautiful, beautiful example of light is when Philemon and Gideon, they have a baby that Rebecca delivers.
It comes too early and is stillborn. It—It doesn't breathe. And Rebecca's trying and trying to revive it. And this is so sad and so beautiful. So she says. “‘Come on,’ Rebecca said. She pushed gently at his tiny chest. ‘Come on, you must fight for it little one,’ she said. A bit of sunlight was trembling in the room just at the side of her vision. ‘I can't hear him,’ Philemon said. ‘Breathe,’ Rebecca said like a prayer. ‘Is he okay?’ Gideon asked. ‘Breathe,’ Rebecca said. ‘You must try.’ But his whole body was still. What was that light? That shimmering column of light in her eyes? ‘Come now,’ Rebecca said, and her whole body was a prayer.
She wondered if she'd ever prayed before, now that she was praying with her whole body and on her feet, standing on her feet, she breathed from the roots of her lungs, but he would not breathe back.”
So we see this and then, and then, Philemon cried ‘Why isn't he crying?’ Gideon left his wife's side and took the baby in his arms, but he was helpless. All those muscles in his shoulders and chest, but the baby could not be muscled into breathing.
Mother opened the door and the threat of light, thin and life as a boy, slipped out as she came in. Gideon holding his baby, cried out for Mother. Rebecca ran. She could see him a slender heatless core of light escaping over the grass tops, fleet as a hawk shadow.
Now, she thought she could see him as a boy. Long limbed, longhaired, light. She could never run as fast as him. She rode Tiny hard to the tour, dismounted before he fully stopped and ran up the tour. Hadn't the little one led her this way? Hadn't he given her teasing glimpse of him? A bright shadow, a glossy bit of wind, a white bird flitting away.
She walked around the rock, staring over the flats, looking for the baby, the boy. But light was everywhere. Too many places to hide. He had been here, but he could be at the mountains by now. She stood and stared over the flats for however long it was and could not think a thing.”
And then Coby comes and finds her and she says, “the baby, I saw him like a spindle of light. He ran like a coyote.”
It's just such a beautiful, beautiful scene. And I just gave you guys the highlights there, but that metaphor of light you can imagine, you can see Rebecca chasing that little bit of flittering light, trying to find that baby that she was unable to deliver alive and bring it back to her brother and her sister-in-law.
[00:15:14] Anne-Marie Strohman: This is another example where Martine has this kind of main metaphor of light as, maybe the baby's soul is light kind of thing that she literalize that for us and we can see it with Rebecca. And then she also has other metaphors layered in there. The one that I'm remembering right now is the last bit that it ran like a coyote,
[00:15:39] Erin Nuttall: Oh yeah. Yeah, there's, so, I know, I know. I have goosebumps. I, every time I read this, I, my heart is touched. The other thing that Martine does is that Rebecca ends up on the tour where she met God.
And so you have that callback to the original idea. And you know, you could imagine the fact that everywhere was light was, you know, God and his angels taking the light baby up. If that's where your mind takes you, and that's where mine does. But I think that's one of the beautiful things with metaphors, is it can be interpreted in a way that suits your personal experiences and understanding of the world.
[00:16:26] Anne-Marie Strohman: Yeah, as writers, we get to move our readers toward an interpretation or kind of set something up. And then because the act of reading is a creative act in itself, you bring what you are bringing to the book and interpret through your own perspective and lens as well. But I wanna go back to where you said you had goosebumps because I wanna talk about the effect of all this metaphor use.
Like this is a lot of metaphors and like what, what does that do for you as a reader?
[00:16:59] Erin Nuttall: I do think that it really engages me emotionally because we as humans like stories and a metaphor is a tiny, tiny piece of a story inside a story. And so it takes us to an emotional place faster and deeper than if she were just to say the baby died and Rebecca was upset and she ran out and ran to the tour, right? That's not, that's not giving anyone goosebumps.
[00:17:36] Anne-Marie Strohman: Right. Yeah. Metaphors. It makes our brains work a little bit to do that interpretation. And anything that engages reader's brains is gonna connect them to the story more.
[00:17:46] Erin Nuttall: Well, and like we were saying , I think it really does let you, as a reader bring your personal interpretation into it more than if you just spelled it out, you can say, well, like we were talking about with the mountains and the ribbons and the roots. Like you had thought of the roots being like a tree and I had kind of skipped that 'cause I'm like, mountains roots, you know, and it had gone straight to the ribbons and so we each brought our personal view to that, and that helps us access our emotions as well. Rather than just saying, her world turned upside down, right?
[00:18:28] Anne-Marie Strohman: And just like what we talked about with humor, when you pull apart a joke, it's not funny anymore. I think with metaphor, when you pull it apart, it actually can make the experience richer. But pulling it apart is not necessary. Right? You feel it because your mind does that automatic fast brain thing that it does.
So I did also wanna ask. Can you use too many metaphors? I actually recently spoke at an Society for Children's Book Writers and Illustrators conference, and half of my session was on metaphors and someone raised their hand and asked, how often do you do this? Like, is there such a thing as too many metaphors?
[00:19:08] Erin Nuttall: There is.
[00:19:08] Anne-Marie Strohman: I’m curious what you think.
[00:19:10] Erin Nuttall: I think there is, and I will say that the readers of my early drafts will agree with you. Martine laid down some rules for me as her student. And one of 'em was to use metaphors rather than to use the body part shortcuts that we have talked about in the past where, you know, her heart pounded in her ears. Or her blood rushed through her body as she kissed Coby. I do tend to then do any kind of emotion as a metaphor. And that is a lot. It's too much.
I think you have to have just regular life in there. It would be like if you only had the climax in the book. One climax after another, after another, after another. And it's just too much. So I don't actually know the ratio. I think that would be a good reason to have a beta reader to help you out with.
[00:20:03] Anne-Marie Strohman: It's interesting. As I was preparing to talk about metaphors, I was pulling examples and I looked through a ton of books for children that had no metaphors that I could find. I was surprised. I thought I would find more metaphors because to my mind, they're so effective and they're so rich and they add this extra layer, they connect readers.
So if your impulse as a writer is to not use them, try them.
[00:20:32] Erin Nuttall: It is. But I will say I think that that is really common and it's because metaphors are hard. I think as you get practiced it's easier to do, and I will say that if you are writing your first draft and you just wanna get the story out, then fine. But just have in your mind that you're gonna go back and try to stick some metaphors in. I like to distract myself with metaphors, actually. If I'm like, I don't know what to write next. Let's see. How about I put a metaphor right here. Oh, let's take a little while to do that. Right? But yeah, for sure. Try it out. See how you like it. And know that it's hard, but it will get easier as you have practice.
[00:21:12] Anne-Marie Strohman: I like to think of using metaphors at moments of heightened emotion. So not every emotion that your character might feel, but at heightened emotions or if you have something that's just hard to explain. Now see if there's a metaphor that you can use that will help communicate that more clearly and quickly.
[00:21:31] Erin Nuttall: If you're looking at like the light metaphor that Martine, this is there are, you know, the light does beautiful things to the land, but the main ones that involve Rebecca are when she meets God on the tour, when he leaves, when she goes home, when she kisses Coby, and when the baby dies.
That's it. And so, yeah, those are heightened emotions. Those are places that you want to highlight.
[00:22:01] Anne-Marie Strohman: A little trick that I like to use is if you have a digital copy of a book or access to a sample of a book, sometimes you can search for a particular word and it'll show you all the instances of the word in the book, and so you can see every time that Martine uses the word light, and you can look and see when those are metaphorical and see that pattern of metaphor.
I did this for another book and I had missed a few instances even though I had been watching for that particular word, and I just skipped over it a few times. It was great to go back. Something that I also think about when using metaphors is creating kind of a pattern of metaphors within a book.
And using metaphors that fit the character in the context, right? All of the metaphors that we looked at from Martine's book really connect to the land or the people, the community. Even that run like a coyote, right? Like that takes us right back to the actual land itself. You know, running like a Mustang racer car is like not gonna be as effective in Rebecca's world.
[00:23:08] Erin Nuttall: It would be really surprising if Rebecca…
[00:23:10] Anne-Marie Strohman: So like I have a middle grade novel on the backburner, and the main character really loves birds and water and she likes to swim. And I was, you know, using some metaphors. There are a lot of bird ones, some water ones. And then I put a baseball one in there and it stuck out like a sore thumb, to use an overused simile.
And so I was able to shift that to something that connected with the character or with her context. And I think that's really important in thinking about the metaphors that you do choose to use in your work.
[00:23:44] Erin Nuttall: And along with that you can choose to use metaphors for specific people who aren't your main character. So I, in one of my manuscripts I've been working on, I have an antagonist, and so he gets certain types of metaphors. He gets like wild animals, kings and stuff like that 'cause that is what he specifically represents in that story. And so while my main character is a swimmer and she loves music, so she gets a lot of both of those but I think that that can help readers relate to the specific characters,
[00:24:23] Anne-Marie Strohman: So Erin, what are you taking away from today?
[00:24:29] Erin Nuttall: I am taking away that metaphors can give you goosebumps. Plain text is important and it helps move the story along, but when you wanna give writers goosebumps, use metaphor. What about you? What are you taking away?
[00:24:48] Anne-Marie Strohman: I am taking away… the thing that's striking me is the literal part of it, right? Like you can see those mountains turns up balanced on their snowy caps, right? And adding those details that make it very visual. And then the idea of the light manifesting kind of being this literal visual thing that she can see that's also a metaphor for this baby's soul as I'm interpreting it. But really, I don't know, honing in on those metaphors with detail that makes them visual.
[00:25:26] Erin Nuttall: Is an excellent thing because yeah, I mean the flame on the spine…
[00:25:31] Anne-Marie Strohman: Mm-hmm.
[00:25:32] Erin Nuttall: Burns down to, you know, to light and yeah, good job, Martine. A lot of really great visual metaphors.
[00:25:42] Anne-Marie Strohman: Yes. Okay. Erin, we have heard a lot of beautiful sentences today, but give us one more.
[00:25:49] Erin Nuttall: Okay. “She had felt in that moment that living was just a thin floating thing, like a cloud, a skim of dust on the river, the call of a wolf, filling the air, striking the sky as if it were a glass bowl and ringing away, forgotten.”
[00:26:08] Anne-Marie Strohman: Talk about layering in metaphors. Oh my word. You saved that for the end. Wow.
[00:26:16] Erin Nuttall: It was just so beautiful and it's something that ties back to her desire and to the land and all the visuals that were going on there.
[00:26:29] Anne-Marie Strohman: Ugh. And the, her language use just makes my brain explode, like thin floating thing. Then ending with ringing, like the striking, we have that ing sound over and over
[00:26:42] Erin Nuttall: Wolf filling. And the sky as if it were a glass bowl and ringing away. Forgotten. Oh, the melancholy of that. Oh.
[Music outro]
[00:26:55] Anne-Marie Strohman: So that is it for today. Our hearts are full, and if you're enjoying this podcast, you can find more content like this at kidlitcraft.com And find us on social media at @KidLitCraft. You can support this podcast on Patreon. We also have t-shirts and sweatshirts, and even a phone case I believe, on Cotton Bureau.
You can go to cottonbureau.com and search for Kid Lit Craft.
[00:27:20] Erin Nuttall: Please download episodes; like, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen; let your writer friends know about the podcast and we can't wait to nerd out with you.
[00:27:34] Anne-Marie Strohman: Thanks for joining us. See you next time. Woo. We did it.
[00:27:41] Erin Nuttall: We did it. All the way done.
[00:27:41] Anne-Marie Strohman: Twelve episodes.
[00:27:43] Erin Nuttall: All the way done.
