Pay Attention to the Obvious.
A word to fiction writers.
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Last week I published an essay on the Rabbit Room’s Substack called “How Symbolism Works (When it Works).” Feel free to read the whole thing (and subscribe to the Rabbit Room’s Substack while you’re at it). But the gist is that literature students and teachers often miss the point when they talk about symbolism and metaphor because a) they treat figurative language as a vehicle for hidden meaning, and b) they treat figurative language as a strictly literary phenomenon, rather than a reflection of the way meaning reveals itself in the things of earth.
I asked ChatGPT to write me an essay about the symbolic parallels between the outward journeys and inward journeys in The Horse and His Boy. I felt confident that the robot would miss the point in exactly the way the point is usually missed. The robot did not disappoint. Speaking of the city of Tashbaan, for example, it wrote,
Its crowded streets and oppressive atmosphere create a sense of claustrophobia that reflects the internal struggles of the characters.
This is what I mean about treating symbolism as hidden meaning. What appears to be a description of a crowded street turns out also to be a commentary on our protagonists who find themselves visiting those streets. But if I focus my attention on this supposed hidden meaning, I’m likely to miss the more obvious meaning, which also happens to be a lot more interesting. Tashbaan’s chaos and claustrophobia result from the fact that there is only one traffic law in Tashbaan: “everyone who is less important has to get out of the way for everyone who is more important.” The crowded streets are a natural symbol for the dysfunction of Calormene society because they are the direct result of that dysfunction.
A symbol is a visible sign of an invisible reality. A million invisible realities are at work in the world, all at the same time; those invisible realities always create visible signs. Supply and demand create full shelves, or empty shelves, or high prices, or low prices. Erosion creates gulleys. Love leaves tangible evidence everywhere it goes. So does selfishness. On any city street, you can observe the concrete results of urban planning, greed, neighborliness, neglect, civic pride, and a hundred other invisible forces all working at once.
So then, if you want to write fiction, you have to get serious about the complex interworkings between the visible and the invisible—not just in literature, but in the world. We live in a dizzyingly complex system of symbols. Seek first to harness the real-world energies of sign and meaning; start with the symbols that work in the world God made. If they work in the real world, they’ll work in your story.
As I said, that’s the gist of the essay, and you can read the rest at the Rabbit Room Substack. In the comments on that original post, a reader named CT Lemons asked an excellent question:
I’m trying to wrap my head around what you said here… For example, if the streets were busy in my town around 9 am, that would be a realistic symbol that people go to work and school around 9am in my town. And if I include these types of natural symbols in my writing, it adds to the depth and realism of what I write about, and helps me explore the complex connections we see play out around us?
CT’s question gave me the chance to clarify my own thinking. Since my lengthy answer was tucked away in the Substack comments section, I thought I would bring it over here where it would see the light of day. Here it is:
Yes, busy streets at 9am are definitely a sign that people go to work and school around 9am. Whether or not that counts as a "symbol" we can leave to literature professors. My own use of "symbol" above would probably not pass muster with lit professors either.
But your example is a reminder that everything in the world is telling a story, and that it is connected to other things. I don't mean to suggest that every story told by every thing is a riveting story. "Rush hour signifies that people go to work and school around the same time every day" almost seems too obvious a story to be worth paying attention to. But let's consider for a minute what happens when the writer DOES pay attention to the obvious.
Say you're writing a story about a man who has to go to the ER, where he meets a mother and her sick child in a hospital waiting room, and it gives him occasion to think about the sufferings of others. The first part of your story outline looks something like this:
Leonard wakes up feeling awful. He thinks maybe it's appendicitis.
He drives himself to the hospital.
In the ER waiting room he sees a sick child from the "other side of the tracks" whose mother is distraught, not only because her child is sick, but because she's missing work, and her boss has just fired her over the phone.
So you start writing your story. You show Leonard waking up. He feels terrible. He calls in sick. He tries to eat some breakfast and can’t. By now he realizes that he's got to get himself to the hospital.
So far so good. You've given Leonard a motive for going to the hospital, which is where Leonard is going to have his life-changing experience. So it's tempting to skip the drive to the hospital and write something along these lines:
Holding the left side of his abdomen, Leonard got in his car and drove to the hospital. When he got there, he left his car running beside the entrance and staggered into the ER.
You're crushing this story outline. You have quickly and efficiently gotten to Point 3 of the outline. Now the really meaningful stuff can begin.
But the attentive reader says, "Wait a minute. It's right after breakfast. As in rush hour? And a guy with an apparent appendicitis just has an uneventful drive to the hospital?"
So Lesson #1 here is that if you DON'T account for the obvious, your reader may be pulled out of the story before they get to what you think of as the "real action."
But also, when you tend to the obvious, you give yourself opportunities to tell a more interesting story. You thought the important thing was just getting Leonard to the hospital. But when you pay attention to the fact that he's driving at 9am, now you've got a man stuck in a car, in terrible pain, neither at home nor at the hospital. You just ratcheted up the drama, which can be useful in itself.
This panicky feeling of being stuck—is he going to remember that when he meets that mother and child in the ER? They, too, feel stuck, not knowing how they're going to get out of their impossible situation. Maybe the drive to the hospital changes the way Leonard looks at them. File that away.
As traffic creeps along, Leonard crosses a bridge over the river. Why does he have to cross a bridge to get into the city? Well, the whole reason this city is here at all is that it grew up around textile mills powered by this river a hundred years ago. There, just on the other side of the river, are the mill-houses where the working poor have always lived. These houses have always always ratty, but since the last mill shut down, those houses are rattier than ever. Leonard lives on the good side of the river, in the suburbs where people like him moved to get away from the kind of people who live in the mill-houses. Leonard has no way of knowing that his life is about to get turned upside down when he meets a mother and child who are barely hanging on in one of those mill-houses. File that away too.
You may decide that none of that is relevant to Leonard's story. That’s fine. You may, in fact, decide to delay Leonard's appendicitis until 10am so you don't have to worry about rush-hour traffic. That’s fine too. But when you pay attention to the obvious, even the overly obvious (such as "traffic is bad in the morning"), you don't know what kind of unexpected, less obvious meaning you're going to uncover.
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Maria Bowler Collaborates with Reality.
Maria Bowler is a writer, coach, and retreat leader. She describes her work as “nourishing imaginative souls so they can make new worlds.” Her new book is Making Time: A New Vision for Crafting a Life Beyond Productivity. In this episode, Maria and Jonathan discuss making the shift from a producer mindset to a creator mindset, and from hustle to deep effort. They also talk about collaborating with reality.
This episode is sponsored by The Focus Retreat, a four-day writing getaway, March 16-20 in Nashville. Find out more at TheHabit.co/retreats.
This was deep—and I find it especially helpful when thinking of creating fantasy worlds because the reader won’t know there’s rush-hour traffic (or some such similar thing) unless I tell them.
Love this!