Don't Hate Me Just Because I'm Symbolism

Symbolism gets a bad rap, mostly because of that particular ilk of literature teachers who just can't get it through their heads that sometimes a blue curtain is just a blue curtain. (And don't get my buddy the Dungeon Master started on trains...)

Who can blame the haters of symbolism, really? Statements like A symbol is an object that represents an idea and A symbol has a literal element and a figurative element can put the most lit-loving of us in a coma. But here's the thing: playing with symbolism in your writing can be really fun.

The Simple Symbol

Regardless of what my friend Alex
tells you, stop signs with a white
line around them are not optional.

Let's start back with that mind-numbing definition. What does that mean anyway—a literal element and a figurative element? That's just a way of saying there's an object (the literal) that stands for an idea or emotion (the figurative). You see and translate symbols all around you everyday, like when you understand (I hope) that the object that looks like a stop sign has the meaning Stop!

In their simplest form, symbols can be, well, simple. Like Luke Skywalker wearing white and Darth Vader wearing black. Or an ordinary-looking golden ring standing for ultimate power.

The Not-So-Simple Symbol

It's no worries if a symbol in a story stands for just one thing, but one of the way cool things about symbols is that you don't have to limit yourself to just one—or just one meaning. A symbol can have more than one meaning, or its meaning can change as the protagonist changes.

I looked up liberty, and I got this picture
of these dogs. I mean, I guess they're
not at liberty, but they sure look happy.
I must be a tyrannical government.

Let’s look at the mockingjay in The Hunger Games. In the beginning, this “creature the Capitol never intended to exist” is a simple symbol: It reminds Katniss of her father; it stands for the freedom of the woods. But it comes to mean much more.

When Katniss meets Rue, the mockingjay comes to represent not just Katniss’s home, but Rue’s as well. After Rue dies, it reminds Katniss why she’s fighting. And by the end of the books, the mockingjay has grown to stand for resistance and a hunger for freedom, things even the harshest government can’t suppress. Katniss, in fact, is the mockingjay, a “creature the Capitol never intended to exist.” So is Rue. So are all those who stand up to tyranny.

The Symbol on Steroids

Here's another boring definition, of the word motif: A motif is an object, idea or image that repeats throughout a work and supports the theme. One version of a motif is a collection of related symbols that are, in turn, related to a dominant idea in your story.

Let’s say your main character’s life is unraveling. You’ll show this through your plot points, of course, but you might also show it in the knitting project she keeps having to pick apart, the way her hair won’t stay pinned back in barrettes, the foreign language class she’s failing, the way she keeps getting lost. These related images show up over and over, in various forms, reinforcing the idea that your character can’t get the threads of her life wrapped up neat and tidy.

Shaping Extended Symbols into a Story

I dig Yeats, but this statue kinda creeps
me out. Try his poem White Birds or
The Lake Isle of Innisfree.

I’ll be honest, I don’t usually plan symbols into my writing. I give a girl a scarf decorated with brightly colored birds, and the next thing you know, I’ve included a poem by Yeats about sea birds and I've thrown a kid out of a tree like a flightless bird and…you get the picture.

Extended symbols, especially, often grow for the writer during the course of writing. You may not even realize you’ve sown the seeds of an extended symbol until you get to the end. In editing, you can go back and strengthen the symbol, weaving it through the entire story.

Or not. Despite how much English teachers live to parse symbolism in literature, it turns out a lot of writers didn’t intend or don’t see the symbolism in their works that lit majors do. Read this groovy article about a 16-year-old kid who got sick of English class and wrote to a bunch of famous authors about whether his teacher was right to obsess over symbolism.

The cool thing is this: You’re the writer. You can symbolize (and yes, you can use symbolize as an intransitive verb, though it's kind of stinky) intentionally, or symbols can arise in your writing through serendipity. Or you can kick them entirely to the curb. If you think you might want to give symbolism a chance, here are some different elements and characteristics that might give rise to interesting symbols that enrich your story:

• Color
• Sound
• Object
• Image
• Texture
• Weather
• Physical Characteristic (scar, tattoo, birthmark)
• Piece of Clothing
• Phrase/Saying/Quote

Caveat Symbolizer

Let this be a lesson to you:
This scholar talked about
symbols so much he
turned to stone.

Remember the lesson of the blue curtains: Don’t beat your reader over the head with symbolism. It may be a bit much to, say, name a character Tempest, give her cloudy gray eyes, have her be temperamental and unpredictable and have the wind whip up every time she’s around. But if used with a modicum of restraint and infused with freshness, symbols are a groovy way to draw your reader deeper into your story. And besides, they really are fun. How often do you get to throw a kid out of a tree to underscore your theme of learning to live life to its fullest?