On using metaphors and irony—carefully

The metaphor of modern medicine as a tower anchored a draft piece of fiction that we workshopped this month. In the story another tower appeared through the mist, too: alternative medicine. This text used concrete visual drama to take an idea and, as the screenwriting teacher Robert McKee puts it, wrap that idea in an emotional charge. We brainstormed ways to choose images in a text so that they align with and support an overall governing metaphor in a piece of science writing.

Then we looked at a new draft of an innovative piece of nonfiction that we'd workshopped almost a year ago. The first part of this text employed the language of marketing to draw the reader into what turns out to be a critical investigation of the promise of longevity boosting with nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD). We discussed the tricky balance of writing with irony—use only a tiny bit? or a lot?—in order to hint at tensions in the text to come, or reveal them with full force.

Resources & references

The following came up in our discussion or were relevant to the workshop texts or theme:

• Story by Robert McKee, perhaps the most famous book on how to write screenplays.
• "Political orientation predicts the use of conventional and complementary/alternative medicine: survey in 19 European countries", a recent article in Social Science & Medicine co-authored by NeuWrite Nordic board member Jussi Valtonen.

Image: Giuseppe Ramos, Vecteezy