A preview of something to come

I'm working on a longer piece for my nonfiction class involving several anecdotes that I'm desperately trying to connect. They are all over the place.

I met for a conference with my professor last week to talk about what I can do to improve my story. He told me:

"Your dough needs more time to rise. Put it back in the oven."
"You have the pearls, now you need to string them together."
"There needs to be more vegetables in your pot of stew."

While these are wonderful metaphors, I have no idea what the H any of them mean. I wanted to say, "How exactly do I do that!?" Instead I said, "Gotcha," and I confidently walked out of his office.

So now here I sit a week later, staring at my draft thinking of beef stew and pearl necklaces (neither of which are at all related to my story). Ugh.

Figurative language is so overrated.