Metaphor Practice Prompts
Quick answer: Metaphor practice prompts for poets: 14 original exercises for building, extending and breaking metaphors, plus advice on avoiding mixed and dead images.
A metaphor is not decoration. It is an argument: this thing is that thing, and for the length of the poem you must live with the consequences. When Emily Dickinson calls hope a bird, she commits, and the poem follows the feathers wherever they lead. Weak metaphors are usually abandoned metaphors, dropped after one line while the poet reaches for the next comparison, and the poem ends up a junk drawer of unrelated images.
The craft insight worth taping above your desk: a metaphor is only as good as its second consequence. Anyone can say grief is a house. The poet's work starts when you ask what the stairs are, who keeps paying the heating bill, and which room nobody opens. These prompts train that follow-through, the extending, testing and controlled breaking of comparisons.
The Prompts
Work one prompt per sitting. The point is depth, not coverage: a single metaphor pursued for twenty lines teaches more than ten metaphors abandoned after one.
- Write 'My anger is a rented flat' and spend the whole poem on the details: the deposit, the thin walls, the landlord who never fixes anything, the day you move out.
- Choose a piece of kitchen equipment, a sieve, a pressure cooker, a whisk, and write a poem in which it is your mother, without ever saying 'mother' or 'like'.
- Take the dead metaphor 'time is money' and make it literal: a bank of hours, overdrawn afternoons, a teller who counts out your remaining Sundays.
- Write a poem in which a friendship is a shared allotment, and let the metaphor sour realistically: whose courgettes, whose weeds, who stopped coming in October.
- Describe your body as a building of your choosing, hotel, chapel, bus depot, multistorey car park, and give the reader a full guided tour, basement included.
- Write ten one-line metaphors for the same moon, banning silver, coin, pearl, lantern and cheese, then build a poem from the two strangest survivors.
- Let insomnia be a border crossing: the queue, the documents you cannot find, the guard who keeps asking the purpose of your visit.
- Write a poem in which the metaphor openly fails halfway, 'I wanted to say my father was a mountain, but mountains do not apologise', and let the failure become the poem.
- Make a swarm of bees stand for a rumour moving through a small town, and track the metaphor through hive, honey and sting to the end.
- Write about a diagnosis as weather arriving on a shipping forecast, using the forecast's calm sea-area voice the entire way.
- Choose an emotion you find embarrassing, jealousy works, and cast it as a houseguest: how it arrived, what it eats, where it sleeps, why it will not leave.
- Turn a chess set into a family at a holiday dinner, and be exact about who is the queen, who is a pawn, and which piece went missing years ago.
- Write a poem where a marriage is a language with two native speakers, including its grammar, its loan words and the phrase that does not translate.
- Take 'the heart is a muscle' literally and write the training montage: repetitions, tears, rest days, the coach who keeps saying again.
How to Use These
Start each session with the map. Draw two columns, the real subject on the left, the metaphor's world on the right, and list ten features of the metaphor's world before writing: parts, habits, weathers, failures. Then connect. This feels unpoetic and produces your most poetic material, because the poem gets built from the metaphor's genuine logic rather than from stock associations. Draft fast once the map exists, keeping the subject's name out of the poem entirely if you can.
Revise for consistency first: hunt down every image that belongs to a different metaphor and either cut it or promote it to a deliberate turn. Then test for freshness by asking whether you have seen the comparison on a greetings card; if yes, push one step further into the metaphor's world until you reach something a card would never print. Judges scoring creativity notice a sustained metaphor immediately, and it is one of the most reliable ways a short poem stands out in a monthly contest.
What poets can take from this
- Follow every metaphor to its second and third consequence before keeping it.
- Map the metaphor's world in two columns before drafting a line.
- Cut any image that belongs to a different comparison, or make the switch a visible turn.
- Refresh dead metaphors by taking them literally and living inside them.
- Try hiding the subject's name entirely and let the metaphor carry identification.
Try it yourself
Write a poem in which your memory is a second-hand bookshop: the mislabelled shelves, the box of unsorted years by the door, the one volume you pretend not to stock, and the customer who keeps asking for it.
Questions
What is the difference between a metaphor and a simile?
A simile compares using 'like' or 'as', keeping the two things separate. A metaphor states or implies that one thing is the other, fusing them. 'Her voice was like gravel' is simile; 'the gravel of her voice' is metaphor. Metaphor commits harder and often carries more force.
What is an extended metaphor?
An extended metaphor, sometimes called a conceit, is a comparison sustained across many lines or a whole poem, developing new facets as it goes. Dickinson's hope as a bird with feathers, song and storms is a classic example of following one comparison all the way through.
How do I avoid mixed metaphors?
Track which world each image comes from. If your poem's grief is an ocean, a line about it burning belongs to a different world and will jar. Either stay inside one world or change worlds openly, so the shift reads as a deliberate turn rather than a slip.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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