Synectics Steps for Creating Extended Metaphors

Literature

Grammar

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Englewood High School Courses

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1. Write a word connected to a topic you want to explore: for example, “friendship.”
2. Create a table like the one below:

3. Either in a group or individually, write words in each column that in some way connect to the word “friendship” or the word you have decided to explore.

4. If a good idea pops into your head, begin writing about how your word connects to an item in the table. You might already be able to get a poem, essay, or story from just the table creation part of synectics. Notice how each category lends itself to developing comparisons between living and nonliving, abstract and concrete, manmade and natural items. (Many years ago, one of my students wrote a fascinating poem comparing friendship to a glass building: beautiful, but easily shattered and hard to repair.  Another student wrote an essay stating that communicating with parents was like trying to row a boat across the Sahara. One student, a refugee from Kosovo, wrote that gunfire was the music of her childhood.  The metaphors that can be generated just from the table can be enormously powerful.)
    
5. If more ideas are needed to begin writing a long piece, then the next step is to circle or bold the most unusual item in each column.  By using synectics, writers move further away from the genesis word, creating more unusual and interesting comparisons.

6. Now combine the items the class or you as an individual decided are most unusual.  You will make an oxymoron or a compressed conflict: two words which actually could describe something but which seem to be opposite to one another.  For example, there is such a thing as a jumbo shrimp, but the two words are opposites.  Here’s a list created from the sample table: weeping willow statue of liberty, weeping willow toilet, weeping willow despair, despairing toilet, despairing Statue of Liberty, despairing weeping willow, toilet Statue of Liberty, etc.  Identify and list places where your chosen item might exist. For example, if your choice is a despairing toilet, you might write a list including places like abandoned outhouses, broken-down apartments, etc.
    
7. Personify your selected oxymoron as new, mature, old, and reborn.  Write down how you feel in each condition.
    

8. Look back over all that you have written.  Write one or more stanzas or paragraphs that develop your extended metaphor.  One of my students wrote an essay explaining that being an immigrant was like being constipated in a bathroom.  His explanation was both humorous and enlightening.