Emotional Symbols

I've been writing about making your pieces more literary.  Most recently, I've been focusing on talks from League of Utah Writers Fall Conference.  For this post, I'll look at advice by Angie Hodapp's suggestions of how to externalize an internal voyage.  Your main characters should make both, and this is one way to tie both together.  

A lot of novice writers make the mistake of simply explaining a character's emotions.  For instance, a beginning writer may write the following: "George was angry.  He could not stand what was happening to him."  This is very boring and doesn't make the reader feel anything.  The point behind writing is to make the reader feel.  Just telling everything fails on every side.  Meanwhile, a more experienced writer understands showing is much more effective as in the following: "George's face turned red, and he clenched his pencil until it snapped.  He stood up, threw his chair to the ground, and stomped out."  The reader is left in no doubt about the character's emotions.   

Hodapp goes one step further.  She proposes that you use an external symbol to show a character's internal journey.  For instance,  she gave the example of cancer patients passing around a candle.  They may show fear of its going out through their behavior and how carefully they shelter it to make sure it continues to burn.  That candle becomes a symbol of their mutual fear that their own lives can be blown out just that easily.  Or each character can react to the fire differently to show how they feel about it.  

She gave further examples.  Say you want to show your character's disdain for a high class open house.  She sips the tea, makes a face, and then spits it out or tosses the glass.  The glass externalizes her internal emotion.  Say you want to show a character's discomfort at staying at a friend's house.  She beats the lumpy pillow repeatedly.  The pillow becomes a symbol for how she feels inside.   

There are so many examples of this in literature.  For instance, in The Scarlet Letter, the red letter A starts out as a symbol of Hester Prynn's fellow pilgrim's condemnation of her action that gave her a baby out of wedlock.  It becomes a symbol of freedom for her, a symbol of liberation from their expectations.  The turtle in Grapes of Wrath that keeps trying to cross the road represents the internal and external dangers and frustrations the Joads endure.   Prospero's staff symbolizes his internal power, emotional, social, and mystical.  When he puts aside it and his book, he's showing his internal voyage back to the land of the mundane.  

Go back through your scenes.  Is there a really emotional moment that could be embodied and shown more vividly in a physical symbol?