When every emotion is a wildfire, even love starts to smell like smoke — and not the sexy campfire kind either, but that “oh god something’s burning in the kitchen” panic where you’re patting your pockets for a fire extinguisher you definitely don’t own. That’s what happens with metaphors when writers get too hyped. They set everything on fire. Feelings, clouds, pets, breakfast cereal. Whole manuscript smells like an insurance claim.
Metaphors are supposed to help, like seasoning on fries. But some writers go full gourmet-mad-scientist and coat the fries in sixteen herbs, two existential crises, and one childhood memory. Suddenly nobody can taste the potato. That’s metaphor fatigue: when language flexes so hard it pulls something.
I blame poetry. And caffeine. And that one workshop guy who compared a breakup to “a cathedral collapsing in slow motion across three continents.” Calm down, sir. She just blocked your number. The earth did not fold in half.
Readers glaze over when a writer treats metaphors like automatic sprinklers—everything gets soaked whether it needs it or not. Feels like stepping into someone’s living room where the furniture keeps waving its arms trying to get your attention first. The lamp is a lonely spaceship. The rug is an emotional wound. The coffee mug is a haunted throat. Someone needs to unplug the dramatic outlet.
I experienced this personally last week. I tried describing my cat hopping off the counter, and my brain coughed up some ridiculous lunar-poetry nonsense about tides: “She descended like the moon surrendering to the tides.” I stared at this sentence for a while-horrified. Like it had personally insulted my family. My cat weighs eleven pounds and knocks over spoons for sport. Nothing about her “surrenders.” I deleted it and ate a cookie in shame. Sometimes a jump is just a jump.
The worst offenders are metaphors that try too hard to be clever — the kind that walk into the scene wearing sunglasses indoors, announcing themselves like, “Hello, ladies.” You can feel the writer sweating behind it, whispering, “This one’s gonna win me a prize.” No it’s not. It’s going to make your reader squint and start thinking about grocery lists.
Humor helps catch the problem. If the metaphor sounds like something that dude hanging behind the gas station—yes, the one with the mysterious hat and the “I swear I’m sober” voice—would whisper at stupid o’clock in the morning, probably toss it out. Example: “Her sorrow unfurled like an artisanal pretzel.” See? Honestly, that line should come with one of those ugly orange stickers you see on cheap appliances.
And writers—god love us—keep tossing metaphors around like they’re salt shakers, forgetting they’re supposed to be a sprinkle, not the whole damn support beam holding the house up. To land it in a very poetic manner to soothe your conscience: they are just seasoning baby, not scaffolding. You don’t build a house out of oregano. And you definitely don’t build a paragraph out of twelve competing metaphors, each fighting for the last brain cell your reader has left. It’s visual clutter. Emotional static. Like trying to watch a movie while someone vacuums and the dog is learning to bark in a new accent.
Let the literal world do some work. Literal moments are underrated. A character fumbles a key. A plate cracks. A shirt smells like someone else’s perfume. These are tiny landmines. And you don’t need to compare them to tornadoes wearing cowboy boots. Just let them be themselves, the little weirdos.
Sarcasm moment: I know, I know. How dare we ask writers to tone down their special sparkly word-magic. “But my metaphor about sadness being a walrus in a prom dress is my unique voice!” Sure, buddy. And my blender is a time machine. We’re all delusional before breakfast.
The trick — and I use “trick” loosely, like the way magicians use pigeons — is to apply metaphors only when the literal hits a wall. If the sentence already works, don’t decorate it like a Christmas tree left unsupervised near a preschool craft bin. Readers will feel the glitter in their teeth.
Metaphor fatigue happens when writers forget that images should land, not hover like confused drones above the page. Let the language breathe. Let objects stay objects. Let emotions show themselves without wearing opera costumes.
Because when everything is a wildfire, nothing burns — and your novel ends up smelling like overcooked metaphor stew.
Bio: Sabyasachi Roy is an academic writer, poet, artist, and photographer. His poetry has appeared in The Broken Spine, Stand, Poetry Salzburg Review, Dicey Brown, The Potomac, and more. He contributes craft essays to Authors Publish and has a cover image in Sanctuary Asia. His oil paintings have been published in The Hooghly Review. You can follow his writing on Substack here.
