[from Pixabay.com]
I've been blogging about how to make your writing more literary. I guess I should have started with WHY make your writing more literary? I usually don't get very personal with this blog, but for me, it all started when my baby died. I had gotten my master's. I knew how to make my work more literary, how to add meaning to a story because I'd spent four years of my bachelor's degree and three years of my master's degree learning how to dissect other people's work. The next logical step would be to add what I'd learned to my work. But WHY didn't strike until I lost my baby in a tragic accident. Suddenly, writing for the sake of writing and telling a cliched story just because I'd made it up, and it was in my head felt like a hollow pursuit. Unless you know why you're writing and for whom, there is little point to adding more writing to a world already bursting with words other people have written.
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I guess I should back up and explain what literary writing is. Literary writing simply means writing that brings more meaning to the words on the page. Non-literary writing might have a guy walking into the room, sword drawn. Literary writers are keenly aware of the symbolism of the sword (manliness, power, anger, intent to cause destruction, display of his psyche reflected in that one item); the meaning of his features (the color of his skin or eyes or hair and what that might mean about his culture or ethnicity), his wardrobe (armor on body and head meant to block out the world and protect him from danger, mental and physical; blue because he's been depressed since his wife died in childbirth), the symbolic meaning and foreshadowing presented in the room he is leaving, and the suspense the reader experiences as he passes through the portal and over a threshold with any number of symbolic depths, and the meaning of the future held in the room he's entering. A literary writer doesn't just write words on a page to show stuff is happening but imbues actions, clothing, setting, items, characters, etc. with symbolic power, with meaning beyond just what is presented on the page.
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A lot of people think of literary writing as just what is canonical, just what you read in your English class because you have to get a good enough grade to get your mom off your back or open doors in your life. It's all boring stuff that is too dense to be interesting and meant for stuffy scholars in institutions closed off to outsiders. But literary writing can be everywhere. The Harry Potter series is rife with symbolism of childhood and the coming of age, birth, death, and resurrection, and magical items full of not just in-world power but also power to enter the mind and transform into something beyond what they are. Many other fun and popular pieces, such as the Percy Jackson series and almost everything by Rick Riordan, Roald Dahl's pieces for children, Mark Twain's works, particularly Huckleberry Finn, anything by Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, the Lord of the Rings series, Edgar Allen Poe, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen or the Brothers Grimm, books by Robert Louis Stevenson or Alexandre Dumas, stories by Ernest Hemingway, poetry Emily Dickensen, and so many others you may pick up just for fun have been written with attention to meaning beyond the surfaces and can and have been dissected for greater understanding by students in classes around the world.
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I'm not saying that your work has to be the kind that students the world round will study in their English classes. But if you can instill meaning beyond the surfaces, bring themes and symbolism beyond what you put on the page, you're actually doing something that may open minds and make people not just enjoy but think. People of all ages like to be challenged. Have you considered meaning beyond the surface in your work? What kinds of themes or greater meanings are already present in the novel, short story, poem, etc you just wrote? If there aren't any, can you put some in? Can you turn that chessboard, handkerchief, hat, or pocket watch into something that makes a reader think of the character's past, present, and future all and once and make the reader think and feel just with the presence of one symbol? I'd recommend reading some of the great literary works to see how they do it. Poe's work, Emily Dickensen's work, and the fairy tales aren't very long. You can read them in a few minutes and you can find them everywhere. What meanings do you see? How can you do the same? Feel free to review this blog and many others for ideas.
