Category Archives: symbolism

Reader Friday and Groundhog Day: Shadows, Superstitions, and Symbolism

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Phil and Chuck Discuss the Weather Forecast

Did your groundhog see his shadow today?

Today is Groundhog Day, the 33rd day of 2024, with 333 days remaining in the year.

The superstition for Groundhog Day is this: If the groundhog sees his shadow on February 2nd, we will have six more weeks of winter. This apparently comes from the Pennsylvania Dutch tradition.

I began looking for other superstitions and symbolism surrounding this humorous day and quickly discovered that the focus was on shadows, a subject rich with superstitions and symbolism, much of which centers around the dark side of human nature and the parts we deem unacceptable.

Groundhog Day, the movie, deals with a related idea, the “groundhog day loop,” which is the experience of realizing we’re stuck and can’t get out of a pattern of repeated behavior and consequences.” (usually negative) (The Guardian)

So, today the subject of our discussion is wide and fuzzy, dark and shady. Take your pick of the questions below, or create your own.

  1. Have you used shadows in your writing? How?
  2. Have you read any books that used shadow superstitions or symbolism effectively?
  3. Any comments on the groundhog day loop?
  4. Do you have any friendly groundhogs who dig holes under your sheds?
  5. Do you wish the subject would go away and come back in six years?

On Symbols and Motifs

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Happy Easter. Happy Passover. Happy Sunday. Whether you worship, play, or simply lounge around, may you feel renewed and refreshed this day.

We’ll be having a family feed with the grandboys, complete with Easter egg hunt. Which invites the question: What’s the deal with eggs and bunnies? How did those things become symbols of the season?

It’s a fascinating inquiry. In the pre-Christian era, eggs were part of the fertility lore of the Indo-European races. In Persia, eggs were presented at the spring equinox, which represented the start of a new year.

At some point in the Middle Ages, the egg was incorporated into the Christian observance of Easter as a symbol of new birth. Added to it was the practice of coloring the shells. As one tongue-tangled minister put it to his congregation some years ago, “In honor of Easter, Edna Johnson will step forward and lay an egg on the altar.”

What about the Easter bunny? Well, bunnies are certainly fertile. That symbolism goes all the way back to the ancient Egyptians. But that’s probably not why they’re associated with Easter.

It seems it was German Protestants who came up with the Osterhase (“Easter Hare”), a friendly rabbit who brought sweets to good little boys and girls. The kiddies would prepare “nests” for the Osterhase out of straw inside hats—thus, the Easter basket. When the Germans came to the American Colonies, they brought this tradition with them, and it eventually caught on. In the 19th century, the Easter egg hunt, leading to a basket of goodies, became a motif—a repeated pattern.

So let’s talk symbolism and motifs because, when well executed, they deepen the reading experience in a powerful yet subliminal way. It’s something the readers feel (it’s for the lit professors to analyze).

Two of the most famous literary symbols come from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. First is a billboard:

But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.  

This is a symbol of divine omniscience, keeping watch over the questionable morality of the characters. Does Dr. Eckleburg watch us, too? The reader feels the question.

The other symbol is the green light on Daisy’s dock. The first time the narrator, Nick Carraway, sees Jay Gatsby it is at night and from a distance.

But I didn’t call to him, for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone—he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward—and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.

Gatsby is longing for Daisy. The Daisy of his past, to be exact, and a Daisy that will forever elude him. After Gatsby’s death, Nick reflects:

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

A motif is a repeated image or phrase. Norman MacLean’s A River Runs Through It is a novella in which water is a central motif. It begins: In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana . . .

From the start we have a connection between water and religion and family (not to mention the symbolic significance of fishing). The river becomes the central image repeated throughout the story. When the narrator watches his brother fly fishing from a boulder, he reflects “the whole world turned to water.”

At the end, the narrator tells us “all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time . . . .I am haunted by waters.” The motif was literal at the beginning, symbolic at the end. It frames and defines the story.

Janet Fitch weaves symbols and motifs into White Oleander. The oleander plant—tough, attractive, poisonous—represents Astrid’s mother. The tomato plant “groping for a little light” signifies Astrid herself as she faces various trials. These elevate the story from a collection of plot incidents to a commentary on life, love, and human resiliency.

So why not work a little symbolism or motif into your fiction? You can come at it from different directions. If you’re a planner, you can spend some time brainstorming possibilities. If you pants your way through a draft, you can go back and look at what you’ve got, searching for symbols your muse may have fed you.

If you write with rich, sensory details (as Reavis demonstrated yesterday), you have a lot of possibilities.

Try this: Make three columns on a sheet of paper. In the first column, record the details that stand out in your scenes. In the middle list your main characters. In the last, catalogue the significant settings.

Now look for connections within the columns. Connect a detail with a character and place. Or work the other way, from place to character to detail. Pick the strongest two or three connections, and see if you can weave them into your plot.

Have you considered using symbolism or motif in your books? You should try it. All it takes is a little extra thought, and the ROE (Return on Energy) is entirely worth it for the one who matters most—the reader.

Note: Part of this post is adapted from Write Great Fiction: Plot & Structure (Writer’s Digest Books) and is used by the kind permission of the author.

First Page Critique: The Table

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By: Kathleen Pickering

It’s my turn to post the first page of a work and offer my opinion—of which, I will stress is merely that. One of my fantasies about reading new, anonymous work is that I would come to discover that I critiqued the next block-busting novelist. Could this one be he/she?

The Table

When Noa Torson woke up, the first thing she noticed was that her feet were cold. Odd, since she always wore socks to bed. It was bright, too—and she hated sleeping in a bright room, had even installed blackout curtains over her apartment’s sole window so that morning light never penetrated the gloom. She squinted against the glare, trying to make sense of her surroundings as her eyes adjusted. Her head felt like it had been inflated a few sizes and stuffed with felt. She had no idea how she’d ended up here, wherever here was.

Was she back in juvie? Probably not, it was too quiet. Juvie always sounded like a carnival midway, the constant din of guards’ boots pounding against metal staircases, high-pitched posturing chatter, the squeak of cots and clanking of metal doors. Noa had spent enough time there to be able to identify it with her eyes closed. She could usually even tell which cell block she’d been dumped in by echoes alone.

Voices intruded on the perimeter of her consciousness—two people from the sound of it, speaking quietly. She tried to sit up, and that was when the pain hit. Noa winced. It felt like her chest had been split in half. Her hand ached, too. Slowly, she turned her head.
An IV drip, taped to her right wrist. The line led to a bag hanging from a metal stand. And the bed she was lying on was cold metal—an operating table, a spotlight suspended above it. So was she in a hospital? There wasn’t that hospital smell, though, blood and sweat and vomit battling against the stench of ammonia.

Noa lifted her left hand: her jade bracelet, the one she never took off, was gone.
That realization snatched the final cobwebs from her mind.

Cautiously, Noa raised up on her elbows, then frowned. This wasn’t like any hospital she’d ever seen. She was in the center of a glass chamber, a twelve-by-twelve foot box, the windows frosted so she couldn’t see out. The floor was bare concrete. Aside from the operating table and the IV stand, rolling trays of medical implements and machines were scattered about like an archipelago of islands marooned in a grey sea. In the corner stood a red trash bin, “MEDICAL WASTE” blaring from the lid.

***

Wow. Now that’s a nightmare to which I NEVER want to awaken. Am I hooked? Hell, yeah! This catapults “The Perils of Pauline” to the stratosphere–and, she’s not even tied down.

First off, the first three paragraphs delivered so much information so incredibly (what seems) effortlessly, while ratcheting up the tension, that this writer is no amateur. We learn Noa is tough, opinionated, world-weary and intelligent. Noa gives us insight into a world (Juvie) with so much detail, that you can taste the coppery resentment she holds against society. And now, as if she hasn’t been “processed” enough through life, she is stretched out on an operating table for the final dissection.

Is she in danger, or was she hurt and being aided? Holy smokes. I WANNA KNOW!

A poet at heart, I’m hugely into symbolism. This page is loaded with it. For example:

1. The “sole” window apartment and sleeping in the “gloom”—As if living in a rabbit hole, Noa has seen enough. When she’s most vulnerable she wants safety from the world.

2. Her jade bracelet missing –Jade symbolizes justice, renewal, contentment and courage. She never took it off. It’s gone. Now she has to go it alone.

3. A 12 by 12 frosted glass box and concrete floor—a reflection of her view of the world: cold, confusing, hard, unwelcome.

4. Two people whispering –nothing is ever clear. She always has to be on guard.

5. The Medical Waste trash bin –Is that what her life has been reduced to?

Next, every action verb (installed, pounded, dumped, scattered, split, battling), every description (blackout, clanking, squeaking, metal, cold) was perfectly chosen to create mood and move the plot forward. Not a feat for the unfocused writer. This author knows exactly what she/he is doing with word choice to make the reader empathize and act with the character.

Now, I know when given the chance to read on, I will learn her age (though I suspect she’s either still a juvie or a recent graduate), occupation, where she lives, why her bracelet is so important, why her chest hurts and what she was doing before awakening on this Table. But, let me point out, this page was so expertly crafted with concrete (not vague) impressions in this woman’s mind, that these questions created a need to know more; hence, a page turner.

Excellent writing. When can I read the book?