11+ Creative Writing - Make Your Metaphors Better

Metaphors are one of the most common literary devices, but among the hardest to get right. To use successful metaphors in your 11+ creative writing exam, you need to understand that you are saying A is B; for example, "The world (A) is a stage (B)". For a metaphor to work, A and B need to share a property or ability. If it does not share a property or ability, it does not work. There are two types of metaphor, implicit and explicit. Implicit metaphors are easier to get right because they do not leave you to work out for yourself the property or ability shared between A and B. If we say, "Her heart is a rock", this is an implicit metaphor and we are left to deduce that the shared property between A and B is hardness, or maybe coldness. An explicit metaphor is easier to get wrong - and explicit metaphors are more common among 11+ students - because in this type of metaphor the author states the shared properties between A and B. Often, 11+ students will make their metaphor explicit by stating what the share properties/abilities of A and B are. For example, "The plane is a cheetah lifting off into a barren landscape". In this metaphor, the author is attributing the ability to lift off to both planes and cheetahs - but cheetahs don't have the ability to lift off and so the metaphor fails. Watch our video to learn more.