Red Roses mean love, White Doves peace: Srsly (6 Icons!)
#2 of Srsly
Red Roses mean love, White Doves peace: Srsly (6 Icons!)
Adding that elusive meaning and symbolism to your work is simple. All you have to do is...
6. Discover that white is a universally recognised colour for the goddamn blank page.
Big burly men are always sensitive, apparently quiet husbands with miserable wives are always wife-beaters, the littlest dog has the biggest bark and the protagonist will always turn to a wise bearded old man for advice and mentorship.
If a woman wears a slinky red dress to meet up with a business contact for drinks, she is thinking about very different kinds of mergers, the young dad with a baseball cap is inevitably coaching his son's little league team, and the author is always an intense, yet dreamy, person with one foot in their world of fiction at all times.
Archetypes. Can't get by without them. The skull and crossbones on the bottle means poison, the red heart on the envelope means it's a love letter. Those are symbols. These things are all part of an intangible part of language which people will inevitably rape and pillage in a desperate attempt to make something worthwhile. This is how cliches are born.
Everybody uses these things, and many of us are aware that while you wear black to mourn in the West, in the East you wear white. These things are intangible and seldom formally codified. This is not about all of these things. If you attempt to use them and fail, woe betide you. If you figure out how to use them well, fantastic.
This is about symbolism in fiction, which you can sneak into your work and people will misinterpret it, because readers are bastards. You can have been thinking of your quiet down on his luck bachelor whom ages disgracefully and yearns for his youth as a fallen Peter Pan figure, and some reader will come along and assume he's just a lecherous old man hanging around with kiddies because the author is a class A Pervo.
Nobody knows what the hell they're doing in inserting symbolism, but if we listen to the various disciplines of criticism typically there is so much to it any author who's successfully applied it has carefully spent weeks and years with an itty-bitty notebook making clever notes and laughing up their sleeve.
Then there's the reality of it.
You write your work. A reader interprets it. The reader takes what you have said - the little subtle touches like whenever it's autumn your characters start yearning for the year to end - and concludes that the fallen oak leaf one lover gives another is a hint that this relationship needs to be over. The reader takes what you have said - like the fact you mentioned a character has shoes twice in one scene - and concludes that the work is a subtle put-down on materialistic culture because they don't like that character and their goddamn shoes.
It's a gigantic crap shoot. It's not one you can easily pick up out of a guide. You will have to wing it, and you will have to be willing to try and come up with your own symbolism sometimes - like the oak leaves - and try and lean on the unwritten parts of society that will provide the rest - like the slinky red dress.
Deeper meaning is a function of interpretation. Readers interpret things based, most of all, on their own lives. If they had good experiences in school, tales of kids in school will strike them - at least initially - as more positive than it would strike someone who had very negative experiences in school.
Of course you can twist how people will interpret any given thing and that's a good skill to have, but ultimately when you try doing this there's a lot more hinging on your reader than before. So you need to understand your reader, how they think and what conclusions they'll draw from what they've seen. What experiences they have to draw from to make sense of your work.
Your reader can reasonably be assumed to know what it's like skinning their knee as a child, and maybe only half of parents (although this is dropping!) will know what it's like breastfeeding their baby - although the reader's imagination may just stretch to experiences they haven't had but can conceptualise. You never know.
They'll understand that skinning the knee and running to mom means reassurance and safety. They'll understand that having someone shove you down and make you skin your knee means quite the opposite. They'll know that a parent cleaning their kid's skinned knees while the child is uncooperative as to the cause is a dark portent of what's to come. This is symbolism too, of a sort.
And if half your audience doesn't 'get' what you wrote, but you feel you have a deeper meaning to convey to the other half of the audience... maybe you just need to be willing to make that sacrifice. Might just be worthwhile.
This work is hereby released into the Public Domain. To view a copy of the public domain dedication, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California 94105, USA.
That means you can do whatever the hell you want with Srsly, from ripping it off entirely to 'quoting' it in your own guide to rewriting it. Please feel free and encouraged to make copies for your writing newsletter, blog, or anything at all. If you would like to link back to me, which is nice and polite but by no means compulsory, please use 'http://www.furaffinity.net/user/foozzzball/' or my e-mail address, [email protected]'.