MIX your metaphors – with real life: Groundhog Day and Faking It

by Roz Morris @ Dirty White Candy

In the film Groundhog Day, written by Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis, a TV weatherman relives the same day over and over again. This is an elegant, profound metaphor for the emptiness of his life.

Forgive the double dose of adjective just then. But it really is very good. And too often I see writers attempt to tell a story through a metaphor but it ends up shallow instead of deep.

I read one such manuscript just the other day. It features a family moving from London to France. The wife teaches herself to decorate furniture. There are many detailed chapters about sanding and scumbleglaze. Children orbit on the periphery and occasionally appropriate her paint. Other real life rarely intrudes. Her husband makes odd remarks about stress in his job, to remarkably little end. The heroine meets a few villagers but most of the ‘action’ concerns her plodding on with her quest to make ratty old chairs into smarter painted chairs.

By the end of the novel…. she’s set up a business and she’s taking commissions. And nothing much has happened in between.

Is that all? Yes, that is all.

I was left thinking, was this a novel or a textbook? No it’s clear, from one or two isolated remarks in the text, that it was meant to be not only a novel, but a metaphor for life and rebirth. Making a new life in a new place.

Why didn’t it work? We could probably all list loads of successful novels about communities sewing quilts, putting on plays or building houses. Is furniture so much more shallow?

It’s not the metaphor that’s at fault.

Because the metaphor is not the story. The real story is never ‘about’ the sewing, the acting or the building. It’s about the relationships made while doing the building, or the sewing, or the painting. The conflicts it generates. And the challenges it forces the characters to overcome.

To make a metaphor work, you need to add real life.

The fundamental flaw with the furniture novel was that there was no real life. All the character really did was paint, and get better at painting. Nothing was shown of her family, her relationships, her life or her past. Her passion never caused conflicts. It never became a task she had to complete at all costs. There was nothing missing in her life. Change is essential to make a story feel satisfyingly finished but all that changed was the heroine’s skills.

Novice authors often fear that readers won’t understand their metaphor if they include too much real life or other ’story’. So they leave it out. They feel that the chair-painting or angle-grinding will tell the story for them.

That’s admirably subtle, but it’s not how metaphor works. (Unless you have remarkable poetic skills, and can suffuse your every description of chair-painting with a sense that you are writing about something deeply universal. And in fact, that’s still adding a dose of life.)

Here’s another dose of life. Does anyone remember the reality TV series Faking It? Characters – sorry, people – were made to learn new skills. Well that’s one way to describe it, if you want a non-pharmaceutical remedy for insomnia. What the programme actually did was put people in a world they despised. A fine art student had to become a graffiti artist. A classical cellist had to become a club DJ. A butch sailor became a drag queen.

We saw their lives beforehand and then their lives changing. Not only did they acquire skills and fool experts, they lived new lives with new types of people. Faking It was about the whole mind-broadening experience, not about passing a test. Just as university is supposed to be about more than the subject you study. Faking It challenged its characters – sorry, participants – on deep levels, revealed their character traits. They emerged changed and enriched. (And usually not wanting to go back to their old lives.)

Okay, Faking It is not a metaphor, more a fish out of water situation. But in order to enjoy it as a satisfying story, we have to see how the character has changed. Transformation is what makes it entertaining and rewarding. For that we have to know where they started and what was holding them back. They learn how to convince the judges… and how to conquer the real world.

Back to our metaphors. A successful one, if you’re still with me, is about far more than the superficial story. The building of the house, the decorating of furniture, the making of a quilt.

In the chair-decorating novel there was no personal journey, just ever more complicated painting. And the occasional villager buying something. Perhaps a village fete. That’s not very relatable for most readers. Moreover, they know very well a novel isn’t just the action on the surface. They want to know how to translate the chair-decorating milestones into emotional ones.

Compare this with Groundhog Day, the TV weatherman in a time warp. The main character is a cynical singleton, a womanising, self-centred egotist. He’s afraid of letting anything matter to him, and so his life ploughs the same dull furrow and has no meaning. He’s already trapped, by his own fears.

See where the time warp fits in? It’s an externalization of his own inhibitions.

Then there’s what the time warp is trapping him in. A hick town with a twee tradition where a groundhog predicts the end of winter. The town is overrun with ribbons and flopsy family lurve. Homely folk who do dreary jobs. The media star’s idea of hell. That gives it double value. Like a really great Faking It challenge.

The key to getting out is not to find a little door somewhere or take a pill. An audience will find that shallow. The hero must embrace a different life – in Groundhog Day to learn to let himself care about people.

The journey of Groundhog Day is deeper than getting out of the time warp. Just as a really successful Faking It is more than tricking the judges. And building a house, decorating chairs or making quilts can all be used to show growing confidence, meaningful friendships, a cycle of life and renewal, a character carving out a place in the community and the world.

The metaphor is not the whole story. The real lives of the characters, or character, are what make the metaphor meaningful. And what the characters learn aren’t just skills, they’re life lessons. They’re universal.