We’ve talked about metaphor as skeleton and as flesh. This week we turn to the mind’s restless habit: pattern-making. Metaphor is not an afterthought of style; it is the brain at work, firing and wiring, forcing coherence from the chaos of sensation. Writers don’t invent this impulse—we inherit it. What we can do is sharpen it, play with it, let the patterns multiply.
Between the Literal and the Figurative
On the desk: a scatter of receipts, a chipped mug, a notebook opened to three unrelated words. And yet the eye hunts for order. Already the receipts are paired with dates, the mug with mornings, the words with memories I didn’t mean to unearth. Writing is never about starting from scratch; it’s about recognising what the brain insists on doing anyway—sewing fragments together with invisible thread.
Lately I’ve noticed this in conversation. Someone mentions the weather and another person answers with their mood, as if rain and grief belonged to the same family. We do this without thinking. Writers only push it further. We ask: what else can be made kin? What other strange families might be born if I insist that one thing is another?
This morning I tried to clear the desk and failed. The receipts made a small, ridiculous city—towers of totals, bridges of coupons—while a line of ants discovered the sugar rim on my mug and carried it away, grain by glinting grain. The notebook had three words from last night: stone, hunger, stillness. I couldn’t remember why I wrote them, until my hand found the pebble in my pocket from yesterday’s walk—warm from the body, the size of a tongue. I put it on the page to keep it from closing and there it was: doorstop, paperweight, prayer bead. The longer it sat, the more it gathered—time, patience, appetite—until the whole morning seemed to hinge on that one small thing.
Later, making lunch, I could feel it continuing its quiet work. The stone was the waiting water wouldn’t soften; it was the pause between messages; it was the child in the next room refusing shoes. None of this was deliberate. The image simply threaded itself through the day, joined unlike hours into a single strand. Patterns arrive like that—unannounced, insistent, domestic. You think you’re tidying a desk and discover you’re building a net.
And this is the part I trust: when an image begins to tug, let it. Don’t shrink it back to “like.” Give it a room. Let it make cousins of things that never met. The mind longs to braid. Our job is to feel the pull and follow the thread.
How to See Metaphor as Pattern-Maker
1. Follow the Brain’s Reflex
Neuroscience tells us “what fires together, wires together.” Experience one thing alongside another often enough and the brain fuses them. It’s why time and money live in the same house, why love and falling share a floor. Metaphor is not invention—it’s recognition of a connection already forming.
Try this: Pay attention this week to your offhand phrases. Each time you say “it feels like,” stop and write down what came next. Your brain has already offered a pattern—follow it.
2. Distinguish Comparison from Collapse
Writers often mistake simile for metaphor: x is like y. That’s safe, tentative. Metaphor is bolder: x is y. It doesn’t suggest a pattern, it imposes one. A city is a heart; a storm is a temper; the mind is a room with faulty wiring. The pleasure for the reader lies in surprise and recognition—yes, it’s strange, but of course it’s true.
Try this: Take a simile from your draft and cross out the “like.” Rewrite it as a metaphor that doesn’t hedge. Feel how the sentence gathers authority when it commits.
3. Braid, Don’t Stack
Metaphors don’t have to sit side by side like obedient bricks; they can braid, strand over strand, to create a rope strong enough to carry a whole narrative. One image can entwine with another—time as a river, memory as silt, grief as the stones pressed to the riverbed. The power lies in the weaving, not in the single strand.
Try this: Take three images from your notebook that have nothing to do with each other. Force them into kinship in one paragraph. Braid them until they lean on each other, until the paragraph wouldn’t stand if one were pulled out.
4. Let Patterns Break Themselves
The brain craves repetition, but it also startles at interruption. Writers can lean on this: sustain a metaphor long enough for the reader to feel the rhythm, then snap it. A garden is carefully tended—until the spade turns up a bone. The disruption makes the pattern visible, its absence suddenly as meaningful as its presence.
Try this: Reread a page of your draft where you’ve let one metaphor run. Midway, break it abruptly with an image that doesn’t belong. Watch how the rupture sharpens the metaphor’s edges, how the pattern is revealed in the moment it is undone.
Creative Connections
Helen Phillips’s The Coat
What begins as a story about a lost key unfurls into a revelation of selves. The coat is not fabric but a container: of dog food, receipts, miniature versions of the narrator’s own past. Each cut in the seam releases another memory, another incarnation. This is metaphor at its most generative—a single object stretched until it holds grief, love, loss, defiance. The coat becomes a pattern-maker, spilling fragments until the reader can’t help but see the self as plural, layered, stitched together and bursting at the seams.
Joy Harjo’s A Map to the Next World
Harjo does not hand us a metaphor once and be done. She builds a whole topography out of it, a system that readers must travel through. The “map” is the central metaphor, but it is also sand, fire, intestine, spiral, mother’s voice, blood, planets, red cliffs. Each image arrives, mutates, and repeats, until the metaphor becomes a pattern of navigation itself. We aren’t simply told “life is a journey”—that worn cliché. We are made to walk a living map that charts memory, history, survival, and renewal. Harjo shows how metaphor, stretched and recombined, can structure an entire piece, insisting that meaning emerges only when images are patterned together.
Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Rooms
Step inside and the body dissolves into repetition: mirrors multiplying, lights echoing, the self caught in endless return. Kusama doesn’t tell you what infinity is; she makes you stand inside the metaphor, surrounded by pattern until you lose orientation. This is what writers can learn: to build a metaphor that isn’t just observed on the page but lived inside, a structure of repetition that remakes perception.
Invitation to Play
Choose one small image: a stone, a flame, a glass of water. Now test its elasticity.
First, make it grief. Then, joy. Then, exhaustion. Don’t explain. Let the stone weigh the chest, let the flame jitter into desire, let the water blur into fatigue. Push the metaphor until it threads a whole scene, then swap it out for another and begin again.
The point is not to find the “right” metaphor but to feel how one image can be repatterned into many lives, many states. Let the brain do what it loves—stitch.
About Me
I’m the sort of writer who likes deadlines and resents them. I believe in coffee more than clarity. I’ve written flash, CNF, short fiction, and longer fiction, taught classes, and led workshops, but I still get nervous about opening a blank page. I think white space is a kind of genius. I think you are not wrong for hesitating.
My writing has appeared in places like The Citron Review, Brevity Magazine, South Florida Poetry Journal, Five on the Fifth, New Flash Fiction Review, Headland Literary Journal, and more. Along the way, I’ve collected more rejection letters than I care to count—a badge of honor for any writer chasing the next story.
This series is part of our regular rhythm together—if you write, want to write, or need to be reminded that art can begin in small, defiant scraps. I’ll be here, writing from my desk or from the road, always chasing the next connection. You can write from wherever you are.
You’re already here. That’s enough.
You just explained something so fundamental to me that I feel like I grew a little bit of extra brain, more understanding of the world. I never thought metaphors were patterns, and they work because they repeat the patterns they allude to. It's what you were saying, right? It's mind-blowing but it explains so much.
Thank you for your article. It has so many useful ideas.