how to get a job

One of the most unsettling parts of trying to worm your way into the job market for the first time is this: you sit down, pen in hand, to fill out a job application, and you put down your name and address and et cetera, et cetera, and then you reach the "previous work experience" section. For those of you who haven't applied for a job before, this section takes up, like, 75% of the entire thing. If you're trying to break into that whole arcane community of people with "jobs"... well, leaving a big swath of the application untouched is, quite frankly, nerve-wracking.

I guess it goes back to an old idiom, as so many things do: Need work experience to get a job; need a job to get work experience. High-five, paradoxical capitalistic logic. High-five.

Anyway, it wasn't so bad in some instances. For a couple of days, I burned through applications like my car's V-8 engine burns through gas. I attacked battalions of restaurants, stores--whatever I passed that looked promising, really--and stopped in to pick up an application. The problem is, you usually don't get to talk to anyone, and if you can't show off your ability to not-be-an-asshole, then you've got nothing, since on paper almost everyone is going to look better than you. Plus, more and more places are transitioning to an online system of application, which is bad for us noobies, because it means that you basically become a number plugged into a database. A number with no experience at numberdom or otherwise.

So, that being said, I've composed an infallible system to get anyone their dream job in a few easy steps:

How to Get a Job:

1. Businesses want to hire people with experience. So I say to ye this, bear-market newcomers: lie. Pretend. Be lost in thy whimsy. Neil Gaiman lied about which magazines he wrote for back in the day to get his first job as a journalist, and look at him! It's not like they fact check that shit. Fact checking is for after you get hired.
2. Businesses want people who are creative. How many times have you been told in your life that a creative approach to problem-solving is da bomb? Well, as a job-seeker with no previous experience, you need to be creative and simultaneously show off your explosive amounts of personality. Here's what you do: 
1. Walk in to the restaurant. Pretend to be a customer.  
2. Rant and rave and yell and scream and throw a tantrum of behemoth proportions until you get the employee to whom you're speaking to bring out the manager.
3. Once the manager ventures forth from his secret managerial haunts, you pounce. Politely inform him that you're searching for a job and that, no, you haven't seen a disgruntled customer--they must have already taken a hike.
3. Businesses want people who can engage with customers. Show that you can engage with people: play up the pathos. This goes back to (1) really, but we're to include this subsection anyway. For example, walk with a limp, and when questioned (if not questioned, bring it up) inform the manager requisitioned in (2) that you were injured whilst saving a kitten from a burning bush, or something. Even better if you can make the incident relate to necessary job skills. Example: if applying at Subway, you risked your life fending off some pro-McDonald's gangsters who were attempting to Big Mac an attractive love interest, solely so you could show her the value of eating fresh. Be that dedicated. And if you're still having a hard time snagging the job after all this, fear not, there is an extreme solution.
4. Businesses, above all else, want people who will benefit the company. So study up on your terrorism, strategically place bombs around and within the locations of nearby competitors, and then go up to the manager of [insert desired workplace here] and tell him that hey, you really want to work for this place, and you could really blast the competition out of the water. Explain why. 
1. If he thinks you're crazy, capitalize on that. Tell him that you'll destroy the innocent if he doesn't hire you. 
2. If he thinks your plan is genius... well, sacrifices must be made. That's capitalism. 

metaphorical resonance

No, we're not talking about Augustus Waters from John Green's The Fault in Our Stars. Well, maybe we are, albeit in a roundabout sort of way. We're talking about writing with style. How metaphors are constructed and what makes them tick--what makes a metaphor genuinely effective or, conversely, what makes one a flop like a wet noodle?

See? In a minute, you'll understand why that particular metaphor sucked.

Just for the sake of clarity, we'll step back into Writing 101 for a moment. For us writer types, a metaphor (n.) is a comparison between two unlike things (yes, thing does convey that authorial sense of elocution and specificity, doesn't it?) which, theoretically, should elucidate and reveal an image or idea.

Example: "I fell in love like you fall asleep: slowly, then all at once." (Yes, I did pull this particular quote out of a possibly aforementioned John Green novel.)

So the comparison drawn here is between falling in love and falling sleep. Two things that are unlike for some pretty obvious reasons, not the least of which is that if I fell in love every time I fell asleep, I'd have quite the harem. Or my heart would be held together by nothing more than Scotch tape and sheer desperation. One or the other.

But allow me to put my love life--which is doing fine, thanks for asking--aside. Let's take a look at what makes metaphors, both Mr. Green's and otherwise, effective. This shall be accomplished via my most despised of mediums: a list.

The Hated, Abhorrent, and Reviled List of Things That Will Make Your Metaphors Not Suck:
(THARLTTWMYMNS for short.)

1. Clarity. Metaphors substitute in for or enhance adjectival descriptions on the page. (Huh. Adjectival just seems redundant somehow, the adjective form of the word adjective. Anyway, back to the matters at hand.) The two are both supposed to convey the same basic thing, but in different formats--and ideally, the metaphor should be more effective at conveying the desired image. Metaphors are prime real estate on the page. They don't reel in quite as much attention as italics do, but they still stand out, so their existence must be worthwhile. A failed adjectival description might make the reader go meh, but a failed metaphor will just leave them puzzling over whether or not they're missing something.

2. Context. Like I said before, metaphors stand out. If you fill the page from head to toe with figurative language, the figurative language becomes weaker. It's oversaturation. Metaphors are the icing on the cake, not the cake itself. For the most part, metaphors should enhance the imagery, not wholly constitute it.

Part of what this boils down to is overdescription. Burying the narrative in explaining life since the beginning of the universe everything. Writing isn't like statistics, where you have to account for every minor detail.You want to give the reader a clear picture, but you also don't want to give them a liturgy or an elegantly phrased stock list.

3. Avoid cliches. The whole point of a metaphor is, as we've said, to reveal an image. Cliches don't really do that: they're so trite and overused that they cease to really give the kind of imagery you want. They're unconverted currency, empty calories.

Now, I don't think I need to rail on about this. Pretty much everyone understands that having the rough-and-tough character archetype swagger over and show off his bullet wound whilst announcing, "That one sucked like a cheap whore!" is probably a little overboard, so...

Here's the long and short of it: Try to say things in new and creative ways. They stick better that way. I'm not saying you should never ever ever say "bite the bullet" or "turned a blind eye", especially in dialogue where people speak in colloquialisms, but if you're trying to be prosaic... well, it'll always fall short of something like this, an example from Lauren Oliver's Delirium, where the protagonist is venturing through the woods at night when suddenly some bats are like, "Sup, girl?"

"... a black scythe of bats cutting suddenly across the sky."

A black scythe of bats. It's specific, it creates a vivid image, and it's a new way to say it. A+.

4. Create a disconnect. I know it sounds weird, but the best metaphors aren't the ones you expect, because if you expect the metaphor then it has inherently failed to deliver an image or idea in a unique way. And hey, uniqueness can snag people's attention more than conformity... just look at your hipster friends.

An (approximate) example, from (again) Delirium: "The air outside is thick and moist as a tongue."

Well, you may haughtily inject, adjusting your beret and tugging at your pencil 'stache, air is nothing like a tongue--one can be used to sample such exquisite articles as French baguettes, while the other is being expelled hot and wasted from my lungs!

You're not actually saying that, of course. (At least I hope not.) But that moment after you read it where the metaphor jars you (the disconnect) preceding the next moment (the... reconnect?) where you realize how fitting it is... well, that's part of what makes it so great. These sorts of metaphors capture things so accurately that they actually give you pause while your mind connects the dots. If the author had chosen to say, "It is as humid as a humidifier outside," well, the novel probably wouldn't have gotten published for starters.

Now, obviously not all metaphors should generate a disconnect. If a reader pauses at every instance of figurative language in your work, it will probably get tiring after a while. But that momentary disruption of conventional language and logic can go a long way.


Now, probably I didn't communicate my ramblings the best. Probably you disagree with me on some basic tenet of my ramblings (which are by no means comprehensive, by the way). But regardless, I hope you were able to take something away from this, either knowing something that works or something that doesn't.

Oh, and take this list of metaphors with you. They're like Lord Voldemort: terrible, but great.

http://writingenglish.wordpress.com/2006/09/12/the-25-funniest-analogies-collected-by-high-school-english-teachers/

Off and out.

Taylor Webb