I’ve been thinking a lot about symbolism lately, mainly because I’ve read, watched, or played a couple of things recently that did it really well. It’s gotten me thinking about how good symbolism ends up in fiction. How much of it is intentional, and how much of it is just me reading way too far into things? How much of it was there in the outline and first draft? The second draft? The third? How do you approach threading a particular piece of symbolism into a work of fiction?

This is especially interesting to me because it’s an aspect of literary analysis that is so rarely addressed in the context of creative writing. Usually when we hear about symbolism, we’re studying it in other people’s work. You see it in the classics you read and everybody points it out, but nobody ever talks about how it got there. You learn it from your literature teacher, not your writing teacher (at least, that was my experience – if you were actually taught this, please comment your experiences! I’d love to hear about how your instructors approached this topic).

All that to say: here are some thoughts I came up with on how one might approach sprinkling symbolism into a piece of writing.

Relevance & Usability

It should go without saying, but like anything else, there needs to be a point to including symbolism in your story. You can’t just point to something after the fact and say it’s a symbol; you need to use it for something in order for it to count, and I think in terms of planning, the meaning needs to be the thing you lead with. Luckily, symbolism comes in really handy as a tool for a number of tricky writing things, so you have no shortage of options.

A very basic example of useful symbolism would be a symbol that serves as a foreshadowing tool. Say you’ve got a symbolic connection established between some object and some character. You could have the object break in order to foreshadow something bad happening to them. Or maybe another character comments on the object in a way that somehow reflects their unspoken feelings about the character, or their relationship with the character. Once you decide what the connection is, you’ll more than likely start spotting ways to use it in your story.

Another early concern you might have in choosing your symbol is that it must be something that’s easy for your characters to interact with. It’s no good to have something serve as a symbol if it can never believably turn up in your story, or if the characters would never believably have meaningful interactions with it. It has to be something that feels like it belongs somewhere in the world of your story. And the more places it belongs, the more useful it will be.

A great example of this is the mockingjays in The Hunger Games. There aren’t really any restrictions given on where they can live, making it easy for the author to place them all around the world wherever it makes sense for one to show up. Interactions with them are simple and easy, too: you sing at them, and they sing back. Any character in the story can do that, and all are given ample opportunity to do so. All this together is a recipe for a piece of symbolism that is readily available whenever you spot an opportunity to use it. It will almost never come off as contrived or forced for a mockingjay to just show up, making it convenient to imbue them with the intense meaning they quickly take on.

Another way to use symbolism, especially in a visual medium, is as a worldbuilding tool. You need something to decorate your world with anyway, don’t you? A very solid example of this is the video game Bloodborne. Much of the world is decorated with statues of female figures who… uh… don’t look super happy. None of them stand triumphantly, as if celebrating a victory. None are posed gracefully as clear works of art. They’re mostly kneeling, holding candles, fallen in prayer or lamentation, with pained or grief-stricken looks on their faces. I mean, just look at these ladies and tell me if you think they’re having a fun time:

And lo and behold, many of the game’s central themes and plot points end up having something to do with the suffering of women, the separation of mothers and babies, the agony of child loss, and menstrual cycles. (By the way, if you’re interested in a deeper analysis of this, I love this one.) The statues serve as a tangible symbol of the story’s themes, and tend to appear most frequently in locations where the game is trying to point those themes out to you — for example, the starting area of Central Yharnam, where you’re being introduced to what the game is about and a lot of foreshadowing is going on. And like mockingjays in The Hunger Games, we’re talking about a thing in the story’s universe that is easy to place pretty much anywhere. Anywhere you have stonework and gothic buildings that need decorating, you can stick a statue of a sad lady. And… I mean, have you seen this game? Other than a deadly swamp or two, it’s pretty much 90% stonework and gothic buildings.

In both of the above cases, symbolism can very easily end up tied to thematic meaning. And I think there’s a lesson here about how to dream up symbolism. Start with your themes, and try to figure out some element of the story or the worldbuilding that might be convenient to use as a visual or tangible symbol of one of those themes. From that jumping off point, there’s a lot you can do, and you’ll ensure it’s always tied somehow to what the story is all about.

Balance established vs. contextualized symbolism

Lemme say something first: I made these terms up. I have no idea if this is what it’s actually called. But I realized as I was mulling all this over that there are really two different kinds of symbolism that crop up in stories, and I think it’s worth pointing out the distinction:

1. Established symbols would be the ones that trace their origins back to widely recognizable elements within our cultural consciousness. For example, most people in western culture associate red roses with love, doves with peace, and ravens with death or doom. You might warp or twist these symbols for your own uses, but they’ll still be based on some deep-rooted cultural connection you have.
2. Contextualized symbols are what I’m calling the symbols that only make sense within the context of the story. For example, maybe in your book, flamingos are used repeatedly to symbolize the relationship between the main character and her mother, or banjo strings represent existential terror, or something. They symbolize what they symbolize because of the work you’ve done to establish those connections yourself.

If you use an established symbol, people will need a lot less context to figure out what you’re trying to say. You don’t need to work quite so hard to get your point across, because the society we live in has already done most of the work for you. People will automatically tend to infer things based on the symbol you present. However, using these kinds of symbols carries a risk of coming across as heavy-handed. Because these symbols are so obvious, they can sometimes feel kind of… I don’t know, “in your face” I guess is the right phrase. It doesn’t feel subtle, and it can become easy for the reader to discount the symbolism altogether because it’s just so painfully obvious what you’re trying to say. There’s no subtext at that point – it just becomes, well, text.

However, if you’re using a contextualized symbol, you’re setting it up yourself. You’re not building IKEA furniture, you’re going out into the woods and chopping down a tree to carve it into a chic dining set all by your lonesome. You have to actually do the work of forming the audience’s association between flamingos and maternal relationships or banjo strings and existential terror or whatever it is. The risk here isn’t that you end up being heavy-handed, but rather something on the opposite end of the obviousness spectrum, but equally deadly: confusing. I can see the reviews now: “Why does she keep mentioning flamingos?! I feel like it’s supposed to mean something, but what?!?! What is WITH the flamingos??? One flamingo out of five. Confusing as hell.”

Basically, if you make it so your readers need a PhD in literature to understand your subtext, you have, to put it politely, gone astray. Your audience might end up missing out on foreshadowing, or be left with a sense that the book was thematically hollow, even if it wasn’t, just because the tools you used to demonstrate that foreshadowing or thematic meaning were rooted in a symbolic code that wasn’t communicated clearly to the reader.

There’s definitely a happy medium to be struck here. For example, look again at the mockingjays. We already associate birds with freedom, so we are primed to see this as a symbol with inherent, pre-established meaning. But Suzanne Collins didn’t choose a dove or an eagle, or any other choice that would have risked feeling too obvious. This particular bird is one that comes from the world of the story and has to be explained to us. The prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, which I am deeply obsessed with, does a lot to flesh out the meaning behind the mockingjays as a symbol of rebellion. But the symbol is so well-chosen and intimately connected with the characters and worldbuilding that it would never come across as being out of left field. It’s a good balance of established symbolism with symbolism that comes from the context of the story.

Make it dynamic

Good symbolism often changes dynamically throughout a story – at least I think so. It’s all well and good to have something that symbolizes something else, but where it gets really fun is when the symbol undergoes some kind of change or effect as the story progresses. This is kind of like using symbolism as a foreshadowing tool, but you can also be a lot more direct. If you’re conveying a big change in the State Of Things in your story, a good way to really drive it home is to have the symbolism follow along.

One example that does this almost automatically are the dandelions in Poster Girl by Veronica Roth. And as a disclaimer, I’ve actually yet to hear anyone else talk about this aspect of the book, so this is my interpretation of the dandelions – this may not be an intentional symbol at all. But if it is, it’s a fabulous one. My theory is that dandelions symbolize change: something Sonya is initially resistant to and bitter about. Throughout the story, she has to learn to navigate this new version of her world, and let go of the old one she’s been clinging to. Dandelions are strong, vibrant, and difficult to kill, which is pretty much how Sonya always saw the world she grew up in. She describes Nikhil – a character who embodies her connection to the old world – as reminding her of a dandelion, “standing high in hope of a breeze.”

But before you know it, dandelion flowers turn into little puffs of seeds at disintegrate easily on the wind. You blow them away and make a wish for the future. And it all happens so fast. Sonya describes a dandelion “bare of seeds now, collapsing into winter” at a moment of bittersweet sadness, and connects dandelions explicitly to a dead character she misses. At this moment in the story, she’s just said goodbye to another person, and is facing an immense change in her life, sorting out the complicated emotions that come with leaving things behind as you move on to something better. “Life is full of this,” Nikhil (the dandelion guy!) has just told her, “letting things change.” And Sonya has changed in this moment too – she is sad, but willing to move forward in ways she wasn’t at the start of the story.

Do you see it? The story and characters say, “Things have changed,” and you say, “Okay.” Then the symbolism comes along and says, “No, really.” And you say, “…Oh shit.”

This is something I think it’s easiest to do as part of the revision process. Once you’ve already got the major plot points of your book decided and pretty much set in stone, go back through and look for those major turning points – the ones you want to hit really, really hard. Think about what’s going on thematically at that part of the book. What are your characters coming to understand or realize? How is the world changing? How has the threat to the protagonist changed, and why? Now look at your symbolism and see if there’s a way to tie it together. Again, look for ways to root these moments in interaction between your characters and the symbol. Things your characters interact with directly are vastly more memorable than things they simply mention seeing in passing.

But you could also plan your symbolism from the beginning around the notion of using it to communicate a big shift like this, and then weave that into the story elsewhere so that it builds up to this point. This is just another strategy for figuring out what symbols would best suit the story you’re telling, and drawing out the most meaning from them at the most critical points.

“What if nobody gets it?”

That’s a valid concern you have there! After all, it’s symbolism: something a staggering number of readers really don’t give a crap about. It’s something that enhances the reader’s experience, often subconsciously – it’s not meant to be the primary thing carrying the meat of the story. Your plot, characters, and worldbuilding still need to stand on their own, without the reader doing a bunch of deep thought about the symbolism. It’s like the flamingo example I gave earlier: you don’t want people puzzling over why you’re focusing so much on this seemingly irrelevant detail, and racking their brains to try to figure out why it’s relevant.

In the examples I gave earlier – except maybe the mockingjays, which you’d be pretty hard-pressed to miss the meaning of – the symbols in question are all firmly relegated to this enhancing role. Bloodborne is still a fun game whether you’re paying attention to the meaning of the architectural details or not. The first time I read Poster Girl, I noticed the dandelions being mentioned and felt sure they meant something, but I had to go back and re-read the places where they were mentioned before I came to my conclusion. I’m still not sure I’ve got it right. Despite my uncertainty, Poster Girl is one of my favorite books, and one I’ll tirelessly recommend to anyone who will listen, dandelions or no dandelions.

I think the big takeaway here is not to put all your will-readers-like-it eggs in this particular basket. Maybe put one in. Or half of one. Accept that as masterful as your symbolism might be, nobody is going to read your book because of it – and you wouldn’t want them to! You want them to read it for the plot, and the emotions you’ve breathed into it. For the intricate world you’ve built and the interesting, lively characters who inhabit it. Symbolism is the icing on the cake, but you should still be devoting most of your energy to baking the cake itself. Worrying too much that no one will get your symbolism is a sign that your focus is in the wrong place, and that cake needs to go back in the oven.

Happy writing!