Welcome to Inside Out, a weekly newsletter about nonfiction writing.
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Sentence of the week
“As if you could kill time without injuring eternity." — Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Long reads of the week
The One-Eyed African Queen Who Defeated the Roman Empire, by Adhiambo Edith Magak for Narratively
How I Helped My Dad Die, by Esmé E Deprez for Bloomberg Businessweek
Writing resources
📚 Intimate Journalism: The Art and Craft of Reporting Everyday Life, by Walt Harrington
Deep dive: Symbols
The green light that shines from across the bay behind Gatsby’s mansion is described by Nick Carraway as an enchanted object. John Green talks about how enchanted objects make a pretty good definition for symbolism.
Symbols are everywhere, from Gatsby’s green light, to the shark from Jaws, to Harry Potter’s scar—although they’re not always so obvious.
There is no central repository for symbols and their meanings, because symbols belong to writers, readers, and characters. But when you’re writing creative nonfiction (and, even, when you’re reading), you can create more layers of meaning by understanding how certain universal symbols have appeared across time, geography, culture, and storytelling.
There is far more to learn about symbols than could possibly be written in Edition #41 of Inside Out, so here’s a few resources to get started:
📕 How to Read Literature Like a Professor — a light (but limited) introduction to spotting symbols in white male-centric English literature
📗 The Hero With a Thousand Faces — an introduction to classical story structure, themes and symbols common to cultures all around the world
📘 Dictionary of Symbols — there are several books like this
📚 Other works by Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud might entertain the curious reader
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