Words With Impact: Describe Symbols as Allusions and Echoes: Resonance

Workshop: Discover Words That Sing

“I love doing something like this because you’re dealing with some of the best poetry that anyone’s ever written. And this poetry involves deep emotions: love and gentleness and caring.” Actor Scott Glenn

It is important that the emotional resonance works.  Regardless of genre, symbols and metaphors as echoes can come from art or music, from sports or food, and many other ordinary sources. What would the Siren’s song look like in a Dr. Who episode? What nectar filters through a romance? Taking a familiar symbol and redesigning its purpose enhances resonance.

The film Simply Irresistible adds an echo of fairy dust to the heroine’s cooking. Although I personally did not like the film Waitress, I admired all the pie creations. The foundation began with a strong echo of small town America by using a local diner, pies, and struggling waitresses.

In the sci-fi series Firefly, episode two, incorporates a confrontation between the Captain and an old adversary by echoing old westerns. They meet in a deserted area, with snipers up on the hills instead of wooden buildings. The self-designated ‘mayor’ rides up on horseback with her posse. The setting provides familiar emotional territory in an unfamiliar future.

Metaphors help create “a holy curiosity” by capturing our attention. They catch us up and we pause instead of racing past words. Like Moses we turn to see why the burning bush is not consumed. We allow the concepts to soak slowly into our emotions.

In the movie, The Seventh Stream, grief-laden widower Quinn is a man of logic. He believes in only what he can see and feel and “sometimes not even that.” When a mysterious woman appears in their fishing village he cannot accept that she is walking off the pages of a legend.

However, he recognizes her inner turmoil instantly and her emotional pain strikes his heart. With her pure heart insight as a selkie, a seal in human form, she discerns his loneliness and uses it to build a bridge of communication, a bridge of possibility. Gradually both Quinn and the audience begin to accept the truth of what she is and identify with the emotional echo both share. Reality and imagination intersect.

Action Steps:

1. For yourself, or for one of your characters, choose a painful emotion. Then write a short scene where another person bridges that pain with healing by use of metaphoric symbol or image.

2. How does that touch make the pain better, or at least bearable?

Share: What echo did you choose?

Read deep, marcy