Literary Allusion

I've been writing about ways to make your writing more literary and more meaningful.  You may wonder what literary allusion is and what it can do for your reader.  Allusion is simply a reference, usually an indirect reference, to another work.  When a story features a woman give a man a piece of fruit in order to tempt him, it's alluding to the Adam and Eve story from the Bible.  When a man romances a woman who is standing on a balcony, it's an allusion to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.   When alluding to another work, it's usually best to pick something that is universally or almost universally known, or the reader will not usually understand the allusion.  Its power will be lost.  Most people are at least familiar with the Bible.  Almost everyone has at least heard of the balcony scene.  

Using allusion allows a writer to draw on the deeper meaning and connotation of the original work of literature.  It's usually best to go back to the source when choosing an allusion, not to allude to an allusion, because then you know what the original context is.  You know what it means when you use it.  If you simply see a balcony scene or the story of a person giving an apple then choose to use that event in your work, you don't know what deeper meanings you're drawing on.  Your allusion could be clunky, confusing, or nonsensical.  Say you want to write about an angel because you saw the story of an angel on a movie or television series.  In reality, you're borrowing someone else's mythology, not making a meaningful allusion.  Let's say, instead, that you want to create a proper allusion to biblical angels.  Then you research angels.  You look up when and how angels appear in the Bible then carefully decide how you're going to allude in a way that brings in all the connotation and meaning of biblical angels.  A reader who is familiar with the Bible understands that meaning.  You have called on the weight of the original source material, and your reader feels it.  Try using literary allusion to deepen your writing.