Up: [[Personal Writing Genres - Essay, Memoir and Myth]] Related: [[Image]]; [[Metaphor]] Course: The Image: Heart of the Poem with Ellen Bass for 27 Powers Created: 2024-05-22 Updated: 2026-02-11 A story line is time-based, so it’s a horizontal line. First this happened, then the next thing. Getting too in the weeds with the horizontal line results in what primary school teachers call “Bed to bed” stories. I woke up. I brushed my teeth. I took off my pyjamas. I put on my clothes. I went downstairs. I ate breakfast…. And so on, in excruciating detail. As adults, we’re usually not guilty of bed to bed stories, other than maybe when we’re telling someone too much about the plot of a movie, book, or dream. But it isn’t sufficient to just tell a horizontal story, no matter how wittily we do so. We also need some vertical lines, which means [[Image]] and [[Metaphor]]. Both take us deeper by, as poet Ellen Bass puts it, *lassoing the concrete to the abstract.* The vertical is what gives us the interest. I’m seeing the truth of this in a memoir I’m reading called *Born and Razed* about a young woman who was born and raised as the child of staff members in a Christian school cult. The story was potentially fascinating because the school is local to where I live, but the reality is that it’s a tough slog because it’s written entirely on the horizontal timeline. Ellen Bass suggests that this happens because of our desire to have the reader see things from our point of view. The problem is, that gives less room to the reader. When we use images and metaphors we aren’t controlling what the reader feels. Ellen’s suggestion is to throw absolutely everything into early drafts, accepting the likelihood that some of what’s strangest, could end up being your best writing.