Tropes weaponize everything.

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So why do I love them? And what exactly is a trope?

I took this Halloweeny picture yesterday after drafting this post.

It’s my writing cabin. It’s also my retreat, my bolt-hole, and my mancave (but women have caves, too, don’t they?). The pumpkins were placed there by my wife, who’s my mainstay, my anchor, my safe harbor from the storms of life.

These cabin and spousal manifestations are all tropes, the most powerful tools for bending souls…

NOTE: I copied this post from my Substack newsletter, Aristotle’s Guide to Soul Bending. To get twice-weekly emails on rhetoric and writing, you can subscribe for free.

Years ago, I spent some weeks studying the speeches of Democrats and Republicans to see whether I could detect distinct types of rhetoric. I found that Democrats tended to sound like John F. Kennedy, with lots of rounded periods and poetic figures of speech (“Ask not what your country can do for you…”). Republicans, on the other hand, spoke in plain, short, just-the-facts-ma’am sentences. (“You need to have boots on the ground.”) When political scientists measured audience responses to the major speeches, they found that people thought the Republicans to be more direct, more believable. That was before Trump blew up politics, of course.

Were the pre-Trump Republicans being less rhetorical? Were their speeches truly unadorned? Hardly. The Democrats used lots of figures of speech and figures of thought—clever words, singular usage, or unusual patterns of language. The Republicans, on the other hand, favored tropes. Did that make them less crafty? Well, let’s look at some good old American expressions.

  • When prosecutors “weaponize” justice, they’re not packing their briefs with explosives. Their opponents are deploying a hyperbolic, large-caliber metaphor.

  • A guy with auburn hair whom everyone calls Red is not the color red. (That’s a metonymy.)

  • The announcers on Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update are not real journalists. (Irony.)

  • When the White House announces a policy, the actual building doesn’t say a thing; that would be creepy. (Synecdoche.)

  • A corporation is only a pretend person. (Personification.)

  • I hope it never literally rains cats and dogs. And a worker doing backbreaking labor isn’t necessarily fracturing his vertebra. (Metaphors.)

  • If I say my wife’s been giving me the stink-eye for hitting the bottle, that does not mean her eyeball gives off a detectable odor or that I’ve been committing acts of violence against glass containers. (Metonymies.)

Nor are we lying when we say these things. We’re slinging tropes; not literally slinging them, just (metaphorically) tossing them about. Which begs the question (not literally begs; tropes don’t beg, and in any case I’m abusing the begging the question fallacy):

What exactly is a trope?

The word comes from tropos, Greek for “a turning.” We call the Tropics the Tropics because those parts of the globe turn to follow the sun. In botany, a heliotrope is a plant with a sunny disposition that turns to follow the light.

Tropes, on the other hand, don’t turn. Instead, they turn us. Tropes are literally psychotropic; they “bend souls,” as the ancient Romans would say. Tropes twist our notion of reality. They play pretend, with scale or representation or character.

The queen of tropes, the one that gets the most airtime, is the metaphor. If you and your honey (meaning your significant other, not your container of bee excrement) gaze at the stars and you ask your lover whether he thinks the stars are God’s daisy chain, you’re throwing up a sparkly metaphor. Your lover knows that stars are massive balls of gas and not at all like the common daisy, Bellis perennis. Yet as your lover gazes up dutifully, his soul may turn a bit. Synapses fire, connecting the patterns of light with a chain of flowers. Which is why the word metaphor comes from the Greek, meaning “transfer” or “carry over.”

No harm done, except possibly to the evening’s chances of getting to third base, a metaphorical carnal achievement level that definitely should not involve bats and balls.

Other tropes are more obscure. Because we don’t know them, they can take on enormous secret powers. We’ll see their more brilliant and nefarious uses in future posts.

If you think I’m committing a hyperbole, well, hold your fire (not literally refrain from shooting, though I mean that too). Tropes compose our imagination, they constitute the living core of persuasion, and they allow us to conceive the future. They also make us do horrible things with our diet, spend billions on torturing people at the end of their lives, and make us ignore existential threats. Just one of them, personification, lies behind the AI chatbots that are helping some people and tragically hurting others.

In other words, tropes created humanity, and they just might destroy it. Seriously.

By the way: hyperbole is a trope, according to, well, me, among even more ancient experts. More on that later.

Do you still think it’s possible to speak plain, unadorned language without falling down the trope rabbit hole? (Yeah, that’s a metaphor.) Stay tuned. We’re in for a wild ride. Not a real ride, and not really wild, and none of us will actually be in anything nor does this letter require you to be for “it,” whatever that is…

You know what I’m talking about.

The college essay shouldn't be wasted on college.

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I’ve begun a Substack newsletter about rhetoric, called Aristotle’s Guide to Soul Bending. In my latest post, I talk about the college essay, and how writing it could change your life—even if you’re not applying to college.

You’ll find it here, along with a YouTube video I did specially for students.

You’ll find the Substack post here, and the main site here.

I'm an introvert. That's why I love rhetoric

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I live in a town of 278 people in rural New Hampshire, between Boston and Montreal. Most of the town consists of a mountain and a protected lake. There are more moose, bears, and beavers than people. This is no accident. I’m an introvert living in an introvert’s paradise.

My place, surrounded by very few people.

My office is a cabin on the edge of a 20-acre meadow. My wife, Dorothy, helped a 22-year-old timber framer build it back when I was working at my last legitimate job, miserably struggling to manage a group of magazine people.

I deliberately face away from the window. It’s just too tempting to go outside. Alone.

The cabin lies some distance from my house.

The cabin is somewhere in those trees.

I ski to work in the winter. When the snow is less than perfect, I enjoy complaining to Dorothy about my commute. (She drives to work.)

my commut.e. the meadow lies beyond it.

We live on 150 acres. This provides an effective barrier from the neighbors. In any case, our neighbors are New Englanders. Yankees aren’t the most outgoing people in the world, which suits me fine.

A neighbor (he lives only about three miles away0 sent up his drone for me.

Yet you might consider me fairly social if you met me. That’s because I’ve spent many years studying rhetoric. The ancient art taught me how to speak and write persuasively, produce something to say on awkward occasions, and maybe even make some people like me when I speak. Rhetoric has disciplined me to think beyond myself, reading people and sensing their fears and desires (not so much as an empath; more like a sympath).

Rhetoric has hardly turned me into an extrovert. A dinner party still leaves me exhausted, and I die a thousand deaths before entering a room filled with strangers. But the tools of ethos, pathos, and logos—especially ethos—can actually make me enjoy social occasions now and then. Dorothy is an extrovert, a professional fundraiser, and I need to do the extrovert thing for the sake of our marriage. (Excuse the mess. Our cats did that. Introverts love cats.)

In the hoiuse. socializing with my back to dorothy.

While I originally decided to write about rhetoric to help give a voice to women and traditionally excluded groups, these days I’m especially delighted when a shy student tells me that the tools I teach helped her win friends and influence people.

I like to think that we introverts ponder more deeply than our peers. (But maybe that’s just because I’m an introvert.) Give young introverts the means of selling ideas and the tools of leadership; then watch them save civilization.

Meanwhile, I’m happily writing alone in my cabin, spreading the rhetorical gospel, and thankful that you’re with me.

If you want regular rhetorical tools and tidbits, or to ask me your burning persuasion questions, check out my Substack newsletter, Aristotle’s Guide to Soul Bending.

Four Ways to Get Inspired

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Need a writing idea? Try these “prompts.” 

NOTE: Writing a collage essay? See what admissions officers want.

TRAINING INSPIRATION (part one)

A GIRL’S VOICE woke me in the middle of the night, saying, “I’m a girl, stupid!” There was no girl; I was alone in my writer’s cabin. But I knew who, or rather what, it was. It was an inspiration, a bolt from the blue, that let me save a novel I’d been writing unsuccessfully for years. Did I really hear a voice? I’m not sure, though that’s how I remember it. later on, I’ll show how memory may be one of the greatest sources of inspiration.

“I’M A GIRL, STUPID!”

I’ve been thinking about inspiration ever since that girl woke me up. Can we  find inspiration on purpose, while we’re awake? Is inspiration a skill, and can we develop it for ourselves?

Some people would call that skill “creativity,” but I dislike that word.

Most of what we call creativity is just the dredging up of old ideas. We take a selfie in front of an interesting tree and think we’re being creative. Well, maybe we are. But I’m more interested in the kind of production that blows our mind. Besides, when you think about it, artificial intelligence is “creative.” It can create a decent memo, and I’m using it to create illustrations for this piece.

AI can create. But only a human can be inspired.

When you think of getting inspired, you might imagine getting help from above. In the New Testament book of Acts, Jesus’s disciples hear a giant whooshing sound, and tongues of flame enter some of them, causing them to speak in languages from around the known world. What a rush! Imagine speaking Persian or ancient Greek without a single lesson, thanks to the fiery breath of God.

THE BIBLE’S FIERY TONGUES OF FLAME.

In fact, the word “inspiration” originally meant just that: breath. ‘

When I want to drill down to the very soul of a word, I go to my personal copy of the Oxford English Dictionary. Sure, you could do that online, but my two-volume set—I bought it many years ago when I really couldn’t afford it—comes with a magnifying glass, which makes looking up a word seem like an important investigation. To look up “inspiration,” I pull out the A-O volume from its two-volume case that holds up my computer monitor. I heft the big book to my table, where it lands with an impressive thud. Each page is thin and brilliantly white. Finding the word takes time. It builds suspense. It’s—well, yes, I’m betraying something of myself here—exciting. Maybe even inspiring.

THE INSPIRING OED.

Inspiration is breath. Or a martini. It sparks words, ideas, kindness, and robots.

The OED tells me that the word comes from the Latin spiritus, meaning breath or air. This seems to be what the Bible book of Acts is getting at when Peter quotes the prophet Joel:

I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams… (Acts 2:17)

That spirit comes with a terrific whoosh, the sound of God’s exhale. The OED notes that inspiration is an “action or influence of the spirit of God…upon the human mind or soul.” It’s also the act of inhaling, of breathing in, or an “incorporeal” or “immaterial being.”

Less soberly, an inspiration can also consist of a liquid “obtained through distillation or suspension in alcohol.” The ancient seers and prophets had their share of heroic drinkers. In Acts, the apostle Peter notes that wine wasn’t the factor in causing the disciples to speak all those different languages. After all, it was nine in the morning. They hadn’t been drinking that long. More recently, one of the greatest poets in the English language, Dylan Thomas, doesn’t seem to have been sober when he wrote. I once drank three martinis for lunch as an experiment, went back to my office, and wrote a magazine piece on deadline. The words just wrote themselves! Next day, my headache and I returned expecting to find absolute crap, and…the piece had some of the best writing I’d ever come up with. It terrified me. It seemed like I had a choice. I could either find inspiration in distillation, becoming a much better writer (and letting my liver kill me at an early age, like Dylan Thomas); or I could continue in relative sobriety and literary mediocrity.

Tipsy Thomas (from the film).

I’m writing this at the age of 67, having had one cup of coffee. Draw your own conclusions.

The dictionary reports that medieval Christian intellectuals, who seemed to be passionate taxonomists, delineated five types or classes of inspiration:

ADOBE AI’S MORAL INSPIRATION.

  • Verbal inspiration, being straight dictation from God. I like to think that ghostwriting is a kind of verbal inspiration. Having written ghostwritten books for a rocket scientist, a leading member of Congress, and a 12-year-old cancer survivor, I find this kind of work the most fun of all. After hours and days of interviews and research, I try to tap the spirit of the “author” and, like Prospero, endow their purposes “with words that make them known.”

  • Then there’s plenary inspiration, in which God’s spirit makes one’s every word infallible. Think of the Pope’s traditional infallibility, or the Good Housekeeping Seal of old.

  • Moral inspiration moves a person into doing the right thing. My wife’s best ideas come out of her love of people, and they all have to do with gifts for others. When her father died,  Dorothy took a beloved old plaid flannel sheet and turned it into an Advent calendar. She sewed 25 pockets and filled each one with a tiny scroll containing a happy Christmas memory. She gave this morally inspired gift to her grieving mother.

  • Mechanical inspiration sparks an action, such as a soldier charging into battle or a gym bro playing heavy metal during a workout.

  • Finally, there’s dynamical inspiration, which literally takes over the recipient’s body. Some tech gurus say that general artificial intelligence will arrive within a couple of decades, a moment called the “singularity,” in which a human-like super brain writes its own software without our intervention and dynamically inspires our future robot overlords.

EXERCISE: Write down the last great idea you had. (Don’t worry if you can’t think of any.) Where did that idea come from? Now write down the last time you did something kind or noble. Which are you proudest of?

But when we mortals think of inspiration, most of the time we’re just thinking about coming up with an idea. What’s the best idea you’ve ever had? Now think: just how did you come up with it?

Wait. Do we even know exactly what an idea is? Let’s go back to that font of knowledge, the Oxford English Dictionary. The word denotes “an image in the mind.” It’s something that occurs to you, a picture that pops up.

The OED also says an idea is a conception, implying that your mind gives birth.

AN IDEA IS A “CONCEPTION,” ADORABLE…OR JUST FETAL.

Whether an idea has to be a virgin birth, or involves some hanky-panky with a randy Greek deity, the dictionary doesn’t say. But most literal conceptions of the sperm-and-egg variety are enhanced by an appropriate mood—soft lighting, Marvin Gaye—a setting or situation that prompts desire.

The same seems to be true with conceiving an idea. When I think of the ideas I’ve had, it occurs to me that they’ve all come out of desire: a need, often a deadline—what rhetoricians call an exigence, a problem or unresolved conflict. In defining or declaring that exigence, I invoke…what? The Muses? My own imagination? Chat GPT?

Inspiration can be prompted.

That invocation qualifies as a kind of prompt. When you ask Chat GPT to write you a wedding toast (not recommended; I tried it), in AI terminology you are prompting it. This requires a certain amount of skill. In fact, while many people are legitimately worried about AI replacing them in their jobs, a whole new field of professional prompters has sprung up: humans who invoke AI programs to write, plan, or create scripts, devices, molecules, and the like.

In thinking about my own creative process (if you want to call the coffee-drinking, mumbling, procrastination, and endless tosses of my Nerf basketball “creative”), it seems that ideas tend to come from certain “prompts.” I’m not alone. In ancient times, poets didn’t hesitate to prompt the gods for some inspiration. Most of them called upon the Muses, those goddesses assigned to the arts. Homer began the Odyssey like this:

Speak, Mnemosyne, of the cunning hero

The wanderer, blown off course time and again

After he plundered Troy’s sacred heights…

Actually, Mnemosyne wasn’t a Muse. She was the Titan goddess of memory, and the Muses were her daughters. In other words, memory was the Muses’ mom. Why should we care? Because large language models like Chat GPT—the source of inspiration for a great many paper-writing high school students, ad copywriters, journalists, and one sorry lawyer—are all about memory. When I invoked Chat GPT for inspiration, I was just doing what Homer did: calling upon Memory.

Besides, I think Memory offers a clue to how to prompt inspiration in our own lives. While we can prepare ourselves for the bolt from the blue or the fiery breath of God, while we can whine to the Muses about our need for help, we shouldn’t ignore the goddess.

But what exactly should we do with memory and the Muses? Those AI apps offer a clue. You can’t use them without prompts. The Greeks knew just that, thousands of years before the Internet.

I’ve found that ideas come from four kinds of prompts.

 

1.     Compounding, meaning to combine existing ideas of concepts, either from your own memory or that of the Internet, the library, or large language models.

2.     Modeling, much the way computer algorithms predict the future. This is especially appropriate when you want to write a novel or screenplay. You think of characters, put them in a particular situation, write down the likeliest thing each one would do, and then continue doing that until you have a story.

3.     Refining: Getting down to the Platonic ideal of an idea.

4.     Receiving: Deliberately keeping myself open to inspiration. This is a small act of courage. The fiery, forked-tongued spirit of an idea can seem scary.

 

In the next post, I’ll show how most great ideas don’t fall from the sky. They’re just waiting to be discovered. Or combined.