A friend of mine is a songwriter and in a band. We’ve talked a lot about the craft of writing, comparing lyrics to novels. He was a bit startled at the similarities; the inner demand of a story that won’t leave you alone until you release it to paper. Or, in his case, to music. He hadn’t thought about how the story doesn’t care if you share it in a poem, an essay, a novel, or a small piece of bluegrass.

There is an old abandoned hotel from the 1800s that is supposedly haunted by a young woman whose husband was killed in a mine explosion. When she learned of his death, the story says she hung herself. People swear they have heard her, have seen doors open and shut, and so forth. But this isn’t about the hotel or a scary ghost.

My friend was a bit haunted by this story. He wrote a song about the young woman, and what haunted him was not her death (real or apocryphal) but the need to release the song. When I say ‘release’ I don’t mean ‘publish’. He felt an overwhelming urge to sing the song in the old hotel. He wanted her to hear the lyrics.

We talked a lot about the reasons why we feel the urge to capture lives and emotions and all the myriad details that float around and coalesce into stories. We talked about how some things resonate so strongly that you just know there’s a reason you have to create that piece and bring it to life.

Yet this hotel was falling in, sagging with years of standing alone in mountain weather. It wasn’t exactly a safe place to enter. My friend also didn’t think it was a place this young woman’s spirit should be. He wanted to sing her to release, to tell her it was okay to move on, that there were better places out there. So he braved the creaky old building, braved his nervousness, and braved that spirit of the past. He went into the building with his mandolin and sang to a young woman who may never have existed, but who needed to hear a story.

Today he told me that he wasn’t sure he could do it alone. He obviously was able to, but he said that he thought about all the local people he knew and decided if he couldn’t make it, I was the one person he felt he could call, who would go into the building with him.

Not because I believe in ghosts, but because I believe in stories and understand the need to share them.

I think that’s one of the best compliments I’ve received in a very long time.

It doesn’t matter how we tell our stories, whether to an audience, a publisher, a multitude of readers, or a solitary ghost. Or even just to ourselves. What matters is that we listen when something inside urges us to speak. Or sing. Or write. Or paint. You never know who is nearby that needs to hear.

Someone recently posted a photo of a man holding a sign comparing President Obama to terrorists. There was a lot of drama around the post and my response, but in a nutshell, I was annoyed by the failed analogy.

What is an analogy? A comparison between two things, on the basis of their shared structure, to explain or clarify. Or, a partial similarity, where there is a foundation of similarity between two things that are dissimilar.

In other words, you have two things. They are not the same, but at their foundation you can find something that is similar. As in the old saying about not being able to compare apples and oranges. Well, I suppose you could argue that at their most basic they are both fruit.  We’ll keep it simple here, though, and not get into rhetoric (reasoning or explaining from parallel cases), simile (an expressed analogy) or metaphor (an implied analogy).

So, with that in mind, it annoys me when people use, or try to use, an analogy incorrectly. I have to admit it annoys me because I do it wrong so many times. Just reading the definitions above is confusing, let alone trying to write analogies successfully.

Sometimes an analogy doesn’t work because the punctuation or completeness of a sentence fails. Or I misread it. One of my favorites was (thankfully) not written by me. ‘The cat jumped high, like an elephant.’ What appealed to me was the image of an elephant jumping as high and graceful as a cat. And then I pictured a cat jumping as high as the elephant was tall. Suffice to say the analogy didn’t work for me because it raised too many questions. Plus I still am not sure it was even an analogy.

But back to the original post. People have very strong political opinions, especially these days. I am not commenting in favor of one party or another, or taking a stand on anything political here. I am taking a writing stand however. I found the photo so stupid. How can you compare the president to a terrorist? What is the foundation of similarity? I’m sure there will be someone who will come up with a basis of similarity and tell me I’m wrong, but I’m going to continue on my merry way here.

The impact of that photo was lost because the analogy just didn’t work.

If you’re going to use an analogy, make sure you understand what it means, why it works, and why it doesn’t; whether you’re writing a novel, a poem, or making a political sign.

And I still want to see an elephant jump.

Next week we will leave the rain, the forest, and the mountains for holidays with family in the high open plains of northeastern Montana. As far north and east as you can get and still be in the state. The days will be longer because there is nothing to block the light, compared to here at this time of year, when the sun is too weak to lift itself up from behind the ridge. And it will be very, very cold; already below zero.

I will be spending time with family, enjoying the holidays of course, and enjoying the break from chores and responsibilities at home. But even more than that, I am going to have lots of writing time because I seem to be the odd one in the family, who gets up before noon.

The first, very rough, draft to The Memory Keeper‘s sequel was finished several weeks ago. It has been left to its own devices while I started on a new project. As most know, that gestation time is important in order to allow time to distance yourself from the words. It allows you to be more objective when you finally return to the page. Every time something is finished, I wonder as I set it aside, how long it will have to sit. Some will tell you to leave it a few weeks, some a few months.

As with most things to do with writing, it depends on the writer. I know, for me, it’s time to start the first edit when I find myself starting to wonder about the story again. When it first gets put away, I won’t think about it at all. Relief will be the overriding emotion. Relief that it’s finally finished. But eventually I find myself wondering if I remembered to do something, or if a character remembered to say something. Sometimes I even wonder what I wrote.

If I’ve reached the point that I can’t remember the story, that to me is the starting edit bell.

And it’s perfect timing since I have this vacation approaching. And so as I pack this coming week, I’ll be packing the three-ring binder with all the printed pages, the highlighters, the blank paper for all the revisions, and the red pen. The story may be worse than I think, or better than I think. But either way it’s going to be fun.