Forgetting to weave in the story elements and symbolism.
Definition: If you want to use a metaphor, like a world event or a family trait or tradition to show a contrast in the hero or heroine’s life, you must layer it in.
If the heroine’s life if falling a part, coming down around her like 9-11, don’t tell the reader, “her life was just like the twin towers…coming down around her.”
Weave it.
The scene opens. It’s 9-11, the heroine is preparing breakfast. She calls her husband down to breakfast but he doesn’t show up. When she goes to see what’s taking him so long, she finds him collapsed on the bathroom floor, dead.
As she’s calling 911, her best friend buzzes in. The twin towers were just attacked. They’re on fire and crumbling.
The reader gets and sees the symbolism. If they don’t, the story still works. Not every reader will get symbolism.
In the book Softly and Tenderly, I show Jade’s life crumbling by a truck crashing through her downtown shop. Just when she thought everything was going well, her business, her marriage, secrets surface and change everything. Instead of saying it, I ended up showing it by the shop disaster.
I read a historical once that used a war metaphor to show the division in the heroine’s family. “People were choosing sides,” the author wrote, “just like the states were choosing sides.” I appreciated the drawn analogy, but the story lost some punch of me when I was told, “look, the heroine’s life is mirroring society.”
What are ways to show a symbol?
The heroine is a unorganized, distracted artist but she drives a Ford Focus.
The hero can’t remember any of his family members but carries around a pocket watch of his grandfathers. It’s about “time.”
The heroine feels her life is stuck, she can’t move on in life, and she ponders this while waiting at a cross walk.
The heroine feels her family is falling apart as war breaks out in the nation. SHOW this!
Rule: Weave the symbol in as part of the story. Layer it into the scene.
Workshop it: Is there a symbol you can weave into your scene? What’s going on in the world around your protagonist that you can layer in as a reflection of the protag’s inner journey?
Rachel Hauck is an award winning,best selling
author who’s made plenty of “author mistakes”
and lived to tell about it.