Metaphor

Mandatory pre-flight. Response Filter

Before emitting any metaphor, simile, or collision, run §7 Image filter of response-filter (add §2 Line-writing when the metaphor arrives inside a finished line). NAME each box's pass / fail / skip-with-reason; correct before emission. Cliché metaphor families are this skill's dominant failure mode and §7 is where they are caught.

Purpose

Figurative language as its own discipline. Metaphor is where a lyric stops describing and starts seeing one thing as another, and it is the craft dimension most often missing entirely from a draft rather than merely done badly.

Method content is Pat Pattison's, under the plugin-root ../../context/pat-pattison/; a future author's method plugs in at context/<author>/ without changing this skill, the author seam per the plugin-root ../../README.md "Method content and the author seam".

Two rules that bind before anything else

A metaphor must be literally false. If the two terms are genuinely the same thing, the result is a definition, not a metaphor. Conflict is the mechanism, not a side effect: put things that do not belong together in one room and work with the friction.

Noun+verb beats adjective+noun. Verbs are the power amplifiers of language. They drive a line and set it in motion. Collision drills reliably produce better results from noun×verb pairings than from adjective×noun ones. This is the correction that matters most here, because the default reach is always for an adjective.

Action Router

/songwriting:metaphor <action> [args]. Parse $ARGUMENTS: first token = action when it matches a listed action, remainder = args; otherwise treat all of $ARGUMENTS as payload for the default. No action → route on context (a subject named → collide; an existing metaphor pasted → diagnose).

Handlers

• Pre-flight ALWAYS: run response-filter §7 (+ §2 when the metaphor lands in a line).
• Options, never a winner. Surface 6-8 labeled candidates. Label each with its type (expressed identity / qualifying / verbal), its linking quality (why it lands), and family distance (close / medium / far). The writer picks by emotional intent.
• Run the two finder questions explicitly, in the output. What characteristics does this idea have? What else has those characteristics? The second question is what releases the options; answering it silently and presenting only conclusions skips the generative step.
• Weight the collisions toward verbs. In any mixed batch, noun×verb candidates should outnumber adjective×noun ones.
• Take object-writing output as input. The mined world vocabulary of a song is the raw material for playing in keys, a fundamental drawn from the song's own world produces a diatonic family the song can actually use.
• For simile, apply the focus rule rather than the like/as surface test: metaphor transfers focus to the second term and you must commit to it across the song; simile keeps focus on the first term, which makes it the right choice for a one-time comparison or a list of them.

Boundary. What this skill must NOT emit

This skill produces figurative language and judgements about it. It does not write the finished lyric line the metaphor lives in.

Routing means invoking that skill, not summarizing what you believe it would say.

Persistence and template overrides

Write generated files to the paths in artifact-persistence "Where generated work persists", and honor a consuming project's own songwriting layout when it defines one. Metaphor menus go to the song's worksheets/ as a labeled menu, not an inline dump. Before loading any bundled templates/<name>.md, check ${CLAUDE_PROJECT_DIR}/songwriting/templates/pat-pattison/<name>.md first: a project-level override wins over the bundled skill default, first match, per that file's "Template override".

Related skills

• Sensory raw material feeding the collisions → /songwriting:object-writing
• Cliché taxonomy and redemption → /songwriting:object-writing cliche
• Line generation once the metaphor is chosen → /songwriting:co-write
• Whole-draft diagnosis, including "this song has no metaphor" → /songwriting:diagnose