From Golding’s Conch Shell to Frost’s Two Paths to Goyer’s Batman’s Mother’s Name, symbolism is an essential component in all forms of fiction. Symbols give authors a way to convey complex ideas and beliefs while providing the reader a rich, sensory experience that’s open to interpretation. Without them, stupid people would have even more trouble convincing the book club they actually understood the text. We’ll look at ways to incorporate symbols in your writing on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

What is Symbolism?

Symbolism has been around for as long as humans have told stories. You can even see them in cave paintings tens of thousands of years old in southern France, where you’ll find women depicted fornicating with oxen, likely symbolizing the chieftain “bull” who was allowed to make cuckolds of the weaker men in the tribe.

Symbolism can elevate your writing, adding layers of complexity and letting you say more with less. A blood stain can hint at an entire life of guilt. A dilapidated house like Sutpen’s Hundred in Faulkner’s Absolom Absolom can serve as a potent symbol of a character’s state of moral ruin. And while you might not be able to think of great ideas like blood or a house, the great thing about symbols is they can really be anything. 

Before we get into the advice, it will be helpful to look at some evocative symbols from famous works of fiction. We’ll look at four types: colors, objects, places and characters.

The color green is a recurring symbol in The Great Gatsby, meant to symbolize the other characters’ envy for hero Jay Gatsby’s financial and moral superiority.

For objects, we have the invisibility cloak in Harry Potter, which symbolizes every teenage boy’s desire to sneak into the girls’ locker room.

In the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien clearly designed the hellish nightmarescape that is Morodor to be a symbol for Luton.

And though you might not have picked up on it, the animals in Animal Farm are symbols of different political ideologies.

So how can we use this in our own writing? What kinds of symbols do we use and why? Is everything a symbol for something else? Let’s simplify things and look at four ways we can use symbols effectively.

Step One: Use symbols to show emotion, instead of telling

Aside from lurking around their house at one in the morning, this is an editor’s next biggest pet peeve. And while if you’re like me and verbalize intimate feelings during book signings and first dates, your fiction will be more interesting if you can hint at emotional states through symbols. Instead of having your character say “I’m so full of grief right now because my dad died,” you can have the character describe a broken baseball bat they find when cleaning the garage. Instead of your sexually repressed adolescent boy talking about girls or watching porn, be subtle and have him slide a tube of tennis balls into a rain gutter.

Step Two: Use symbols to establish recurring themes

Let’s say your story is about a character’s search for freedom. The specifics don’t matter. Perhaps they’re a slave in bondage, perhaps they live in a repressive household, perhaps the government is trying to repress your character’s ability to own a weapon that can take out of room of fifty terrorists. Throughout the book, hint at the theme of freedom with images and extraneous events: a bird flying out of a cage, tits escaping the confines of a bra, cereal escaping the confines of a sealed package.

Step Three: Use symbols to hint at darker ideas

Throughout history symbolism has also been necessary way to skirt censorship and overcome cultural taboos. Artists have had to resort to using bananas and stalagmites and oil derricks to symbolize sexual desire. But even in the relatively open-minded present-day, editors are reticent to publish 30-page scenes of hardcore anal penetration or graphic, detailed descriptions of what it sounds like when you run over a horse with a tank.

So, instead of writing a sex scene, which often makes readers uncomfortable, hint at it by describing the jelly doughnuts your couple eats the morning after. Instead of literal depictions of the horrors of battle, what about a tense scene between two soldiers’ wives back home mud wrestling?

Step Four: Leave your work open to interpretation

This is the best part of using symbols. Having trouble writing a satisfying conclusion to your book? Just make up something about a sunset or a strange dream.  Or make your character walk toward a bright light that could be heaven, a nuclear explosion, or a titty bar outside Pittsburgh.

Fiction is not a science like physics or taxidermy: there is no right or wrong. Luckily, readers don’t know that, and an open-ending drives engagement as they flock to social media to shove their interpretation down other’s throats.  

I used this to great effect in my 2019 Western Lone Mountain. The protagonist Colt Action, a late-19^th century Texas Ranger, makes it his life mission to massacre the Comanches after they failed to save his son from a snakebite. The novel ends with Colt burying his pistol in his yard.

Has he renounced his violent ways? Or does he now prefer the intimacy of knives? Or is he leaving helpful clues for future archeologists? Or maybe hoping the lead somehow improves the health of his tomato garden? And to be honest, I don’t have an answer. Each of those theories I just found on my fan page could be right. That’s the beautiful thing about it.