I’m spending the weekend at the Sirens conference in Washington state. The best part about such conferences tends to be meeting other book people – writers, editors, agents, fans, booksellers. The second best part is talking books with book people, because there are always people with a different angle on things to poke you into thinking harder about writing and the things one can do with it.

One of the topics that nearly always comes up when you get a bunch of serious non-writer book people and a bunch of intent writers and would-be writers together is that of symbolism and, by extension, process. I pair them because my experience has been that the discussion starts with someone asking “Do you decide on your symbolism before your start writing, or do things come up as you write and you make them symbols?”

Before I get to answering that, let me pause for a brief definition: for purposes of this post, symbolism refers to some sort of larger meaning that can be applied to things in a story. Under the right circumstances, anything in a story, from character death to goldfish can “mean something” – that is, it can represent something more than the obvious literal object or event itself.

Most of us have been trained by years of English Lit classes to look for symbolism in stories. Some English teachers appear to think that all stories are written in a kind of secret code deliberately invented by the author, which must be deciphered in order to properly enjoy the story.

This is nonsense, but it is particularly pernicious nonsense because in promoting this view of books and stories, these folks not only ruin the simple enjoyment of books for many students, but also often convince would-be writers that the only “right” way to write is to first sit down and invent that secret code that future graduate students and English teachers will have to teach their students to understand.

Coming up with suitably deep, significant, and interconnected symbolism becomes a burden…and if (as often happens) the story starts to veer from the planned symbolic underpinning, the would-be writer faces a decision crisis: should she force the story to follow the original (and now less satisfying) plan, or should she ditch the plan and the laboriously-worked-out symbolism, and let the story go where it wants? And if she lets the story go, will she have to come up with a new set of symbols?

Several things get forgotten in all this. First, every writer has a different process. That means that some writers will make up symbols in advance, some will latch on as the story grows, some will add them or poke up their significance during the rewrite, and some will ignore them altogether, letting the story or their subconscious handle that aspect.

Second, in order to come up with a suitably coherent, deep, etc. set of symbols in advance, a writer has to have some idea of what they want to say. While many writers will tell you that knowing what you want to say before you begin is a necessity, this is obviously not the case, or there would not be so many “blank page” writers whose preferred writing method is to sit down in front of a blank page/screen and surprise themselves. A writer who is at the extreme end of the seat-of-the-pants, make-it-up-as-you-go scale is unlikely to find much utility in making up symbols in advance, as it is quite possible that the symbolic items won’t end up in the story at all.

Third, even if you do make up a secret symbol code, there are going to be symbols in your story that you didn’t deliberately and consciously put there. Because in addition to whatever you do deliberately, there are going to be things that become symbolic because of the way they occur in the story that you didn’t notice. There are also going to be things that are symbolic to you personally, most of which you probably don’t consciously realize unless you have had years of therapy to uncover the fact that you have always associated the fishpond in your grandmother’s yard with her death from choking on a fishbone, so you always unconsciously use water as a symbol for death. There are things that people already think are symbolic of something, even if you decided that particular thing ought to mean something else in your story. Finally, there are going to be things that are personally symbolic to each of your readers, which you won’t know about and can’t control and which mess up your deliberate or unconscious symbols (like the reader for whom water is a symbol of life, or fish are a symbol of fertilizer).

The vast majority of the writers I know do not bother much about the symbolism of their stories. They let the symbolism, if any, grow out of the development of the story itself. There are a few who can figure out what they have done after the first draft is finished, and go back and tweak it during revision to make it stronger and more consistent.

8 Comments
  1. Long time fan and reader, first time poster.

    I’m so glad you broached this topic. When I write, there is always a small tendril of niggling doubt that my lack of mapped-out symbolism makes me a lazy writer.

    Now I’m sort of just going off this train of thought that occurred to me as I was reading this page, but; isn’t symbolism in part, up to the reader? Obviously, authors intend for books to be read a certain way, and depict specific imagery, plot, and ideas. But, what if someones concept of family really differs from that of the author? Maybe they can glean some deeper meaning for themselves from what they’re given in a totally different and unique way. Maybe the concept of family dinner to them will symbolize duty and sacrifice, while to someone else it may mean unconditional love or intimacy. Doesn’t that difference in opinion spark dialogue and interest in the book and symbols? I feel like leaving some aspects of symbolism up to interpretation can lead to a richer story that resonates with a bigger audience, and even those out of the projected demographic. Just a thought, and I’m sure its been voiced before.

  2. When complimented on the symbolism of something in a story, it’s always wise to smile as if you meant it all along.

    On the whole, I find attention to symbolism only works when it is symbolic to the characters, too — a missing child’s teddy bear, for instance — or when it’s also setting the mood — when some noise has to come through the window to remind the characters there’s a world out there, the symbolic effect of birdsong vs. an argument vs. the wail of a siren vs. a low rumble of thunder bears consideration.

  3. I have also thought the whole symbolism area to be overdone.

    You may have brought some colour to the cheeks of academics.

  4. I’ve never thought much about it as I write. One of my beta readers told me that if I was going to put such importance on the symbolism in the end then I should mention it earlier in the beginning – I had never thought of the thing she was mentioning as being symbolic. Looking at it now, I can kind of see it, so I guess an outside perspective can help. But still, most writers I know don’t *try* to make anything symbolic.

  5. As far as I can recall, I’ve never used symbolism in anything I ever wrote. I was trying to tell a story, not an allegory. (I suppose I *could* write an allegory if I had to, but I’ve never felt the need.)

  6. I probably have thought about this too much, because of spending ten years as a scholar of medieval literature, and particular one studying Dante–so I’m used to thinking about symbolism ranging to outright (and exceptionally complex) allegory, and allegoresis (the effort to decode allegory) ranging from the extraordinarily beautiful to the hilariously inappropriate (Ovid’s Metamorphoses as prophetic crypto-Christian allegory, for instance).

    So I thought a great deal about the symbols in my first novel. But they came out of the story, they were personally and culturally important to the viewpoint character, and they have their own weight of symbolic resonances that I was deliberately playing with (the phoenix, the river, a crown, a sword …). I also did my best to keep them fairly subtle. But then, I was curious about how it works to *write* a book with complex symbolism and symbolic patterns–though mostly what it did was give me even more respect for Dante’s skill in that field!

    I’m not trying anything of the sort with the new story, however. It’s not that kind of book. Any symbolism in it will be of the subconscious or half-accidental type.

  7. Structurally, symbolism adds weight to a story, though the exact details are often worked out afterward, and the writer goes back to strengthen or place early references – the fact that we can makes it both possible and fun.

    I like it – as long as it is icing on the story cake, not the cake itself. I picked out, after the first draft, a couple of things which meant something to the characters – and reinforced them – and I liked the results enough to leave them in. But the references are light, though they turned out to let me do things in a particular way at the climax which then felt right. Just another tool to be mastered AFTER basic craft, because there is nothing sillier than symbolism badly done.

  8. This is so true. I found some old short stories I wrote with extremely overdone symbolism from back when I was in college. It was really awful. That’s probably not a writing method that’ll work for me. Fortunately, there was some dialogue I was able to salvage from that mess.