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.

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.

Imagine a story where a secret agent is asked to find the kidnapped son of an intelligence official. An exciting scenario, right? But halfway into the story, we realize not only does our protagonist need to find the son, he needs to stop him from unintentionally unleashing a secretly-implanted supervirus. Ratchets up the tension, doesn’t it? As you probably guessed, I didn’t just make this up. This is the plot of 2002 classic sci-fi thriller, Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever. But I use it only to show how important raising the stakes are to your story.

So, what do we mean when we say “Raise the stakes?” Stakes are something gained or lost in the character’s pursuit of a goal; they are potential consequences. This phrase comes from Dracula, where the raising of the “stake” to kill the head vampire was the climax of the story.

Think of stakes as “If…, then…” statements. If Ahab doesn’t kill Moby Dick, many people won’t have oil to burn their lanterns. If Gatsby doesn’t earn enough money, the poor won’t have anyone to aspire to. Or in my 2011 sci-fi thriller Naptime, if John Crater, after getting injected with an experimental serum, doesn’t get at least eight hours of sleep each night, his heart will stop.

There are three kinds of stakes: external stakes, internal stakes, and post-ternal stakes. Let’s take a glance at each one. External stakes refers to what’s happening in the world around your characters. Perhaps an asteroid the size of Nauru is headed toward the Earth or perhaps your character has a big test on obscure island nations that he needs to pass to graduate high school.

Internal stakes are the emotional impacts of a success or failure. They are what fuels the character to pursue their goals. Revenge is a big one. As is love. In the Count of Monte Cristo, it’s the thought of living in a world where injustice isn’t resolved. In legendary Denver Broncos placekicker Jason Elam’s Monday Night Jihad, it’s giving up the sport you love to stop the terrorists from destroying America.

For the sake of brevity, I’ll just say that post-ternal stakes are the stakes for the reader if they don’t finish the story. Confusion, blue balls, or a dearth of knowledge regarding the dangers of radon are all common post-ternal stakes. If your reader isn’t experiencing anything like this after they stop reading your book, it’s most likely your stakes aren’t high enough.

Here are a few steps you can take to ensure you’re raising the stakes correctly.

Step One: Add a Ticking Clock

A lot of people ask me, John, how can I raise the stakes in my writing. Well, you can always start by adding a ticking clock. Your character doesn’t have to be aware of a time limit but your reader should be. There should be some time frame in which the character needs to achieve their goal. It doesn’t have to be a clock, obviously. You could use an egg timer, a stopwatch, an hourglass, a Chippendales calendar, a sundial, a marine chronometer, or the photon absorption by transitions between the two hyperfine ground states of caesium-133 atoms 

Or find other ways to indicate a time limit. If you’re writing a thriller, trap your characters in a place where, if they don’t leave soon, they’ll never make it out alive. Like Baltimore.

Step Two: Combine internal and external stakes

Create scenarios in which your character has stakes in multiple-levels. In the Lord of the Rings, the external stakes for Frodo is that if he doesn’t destroy the ring, all of Middle Earth will fall into darkness. But on a personal level, if he doesn’t set off on this quest, people will realize how gay he is.

To give another example, if your character is trying to defuse a bomb in an elementary school, maybe focus on the guilt they still feel about all those bombs they made in their young and wild years.  

Step Three: Proportionality matters

Not all books need to escalate to world-ending stakes. It should escalate in proportion with your characters and the goals you’ve set up for them. If it’s a coming of age story set in a small town, you could go with this: If we don’t raise enough money, they’re going to tear down this teen rec center and turn it into a wildlife refuge. In one short story I wrote called “Action News” the stakes were simply whether or not an all-male local news broadcast team would have good ratings.

Step Four: Don’t forget about positive consequences

So far, we’ve focused on negative consequences, what a character risks losing. But we can’t forget why we want our reader to root for our characters. Getting laid is a great option. As readers, your audience is likely undesirable and sexually dormant and therefore rely on books for satisfaction.

Step Five: Create moral no-win scenarios

These are some of the most compelling scenarios in all of fiction. Put your characters in awkward situations where, no matter what they chose, something bad will happen. You could write about a New York City cop who’s torn between maintaining a vibrant, diverse community with lots of great authentic ethnic cuisines and terrorizing minorities like all his experience and training has told him to. Or you could do something like Batman, where he has to decide whether or not keeping the streets of Gotham safe justifies brainwashing and sexually enslaving a young man to help him do it.