A reminder of how good writing happens

Call in the metaphor squad and other writing tips from Poynter's Beat Academy

ew York Times reporter Jeanna Smialek was stalled on a story. She wanted to describe how people of her generation — millennials — were distorting the economy, and all she knew for sure was there was an image she didn’t want to use: the snake and the egg.

“The snake metaphor was gross,” Smialek said. “You don’t want to talk about food moving through a snake in a nut graph. And I’m like, that’s the energy I want to go for, but less disgusting.”

What she came up with was similar, and better. She compared her generation’s economic impact to a person “squeezing into a too-small sweater.”

“At every life stage, it has stretched a system that was often too small to accommodate it, leaving it somewhat flabby and misshapen in its wake.”

We can pause to appreciate the line, but for us at Beat Academy, the real take-home lesson is how Smialek found it.

“If you could only see the hours of time and debate that went into the sweater metaphor,” she said. “I probably made 16 people talk about metaphors with me before I finally came upon one that worked.”

To read the full article on poynter.org, click here