“In a time of destruction, create something.”
The Zen Master and I went to a special Friday night gathering at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis to see the incredibly vivid work of Pacita Abad. They encouraged people to wear bright colors and patterns to reflect Pacita's work and, as a Capricorn, I had to follow this rule to a T. 😂
I got the idea to take these PJ's I inherited from a friend - can I just say....we KILLED IT with the art crowd. One woman came up to us and said: "First I saw the jacket. Then I saw the pants. And then I was amazed." Made my night!
I chose this picture because it is an objective correlative of my mood these days: happy, hopeful, ready to take risks.
The objective correlative is the single most impactful literary device I share with writers who are looking to up their writing game.
What the heck is an "objective correlative"?
This is a term I learned while getting my MFA, where lecturers traced the term's popularization to T.S. Eliot's essay "Hamlet and his Problems" (1919). Side note: Hamlet had A LOT of problems. For the nerds: according to literary detectives, the term appeared to have first been used by Washington Allston, an American painter and poet, in 1840.
Here's Eliot's definition, which requires some mental gymnastics:
“…a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that Particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked” (qtd. in J. A. Cuddon’s Dictionary of Literary Terms, page 647).
Translation: The objective correlative is the ultimate in metaphor, using something outside of your characters as symbolism that deepens the emotional resonance in your story and creates vivid, memorable moments.
This device allows you to use one object or weather system or place to convey what would have required pages and pages of on-the-nose writing.
In other words, the objective correlative is something in the world of your story - the weather, an object, anything that is not internal or action-oriented - that does the heavy lifting of conveying the emotional state of your protagonist, your theme, the world of your book, and so much more.
My most classic example is when writers use the weather to convey the inner state of their protagonist, whether it is reflecting it or used in juxtaposition. Think about how stormy and dark the weather and palette of the later Harry Potter movies are in comparison to the bright, sunny vibes in the earlier films. As Harry confronts his demons and prepares for his final showdown with Voldemort, the environment itself reflects his inner turmoil far better than people turning to the camera and saying, "Harry is depressed and traumatized and very confused about his role in saving the world."
The objective correlative is the ace up your sleeve in show, don't tell.
Now you have an actual STRATEGY to do that. For those of you who don't find showing vs. telling intuitive, then the objective correlative is your new best friend.
Back to the Zen Master and I rocking those PJ's:
Those outfits described our emotional state: two people walk into a place looking like that, you think they're happy, goofy, a unit that is playful and down for whatever. Now imagine if we'd both been dressed entirely in old, stained sweats with holes in a party filled with bright colors and creative fashion. What do you think those clothes would symbolize about the couple? The state of their marriage, finances, mental health?
In my novel Bad Romance, the protagonist, Grace, wears pink combat boots. They're an objective correlative for the fight of her life that she finds herself in when her relationship with her boyfriend turns abusive and she encounters emotional abuse at home. But they're pink because she's gonna put up her dukes with her creativity and dreams. Those boots tell us she's not going down easy, and she's going to do things her way.
In contrast, the protagonist of The Iron Widow, Zeitan, a fierce pilot in a world where girls are sacrificed in battle, has bound feet - an agonizing practice performed in ancient China and thought to make girls more attractive to potential suitors. She longs to be free of the agonizing pain and knows she will never have the freedom available to some of the other female pilots, whose feet are not bound. This is an objective correlative for female subjugation and violence against women. (This YA novel was described to me as a "feminist scream of rage" and WHOA is it ever).
A Few Famous Examples of the Objective Correlative
The above cover of Rebecca shows one of the many objective correlatives in that novel, which is filled with them. I often assign this book to my writers who are oriented toward setting so that they can learn from a master how to use setting to convey the emotional state of the protagonist. The sea, the weather, Manderlay, and so many objects that belonged to Rebecca all convey the delicious gothic horror of this novel.
Rosebud in Citizen Kane
The green light at the end of the dock in Gatsby
The bagel in Everything, Everywhere, All at Once
Katniss's pin in The Hunger Games
Below is an example from Mexican Gothic. Notice how the setting is giving us so much information about this house and its inhabitants without saying, "This house is creepy AF, run away, girl, RUN!"
I especially dig the comparison to a scene of a crime. This novel is twisty and filled with suspense; this specific choice of words adds to the layers of foreboding and sinister tone. How would this read differently if the nymphs weren't "silent guardians" but cheerful greeters? What if the oval on the wall was compared to a portal, rather than the fingerprint of a crime scene? What if the crystal wasn't cloudy with age but was a nod to the gilded age and reminded Noemí of champagne glasses?
Do you see how the specificity here changes everything?
Exercises for Working with the Objective Correlative
At the back of John Gardner's The Art of Fiction there are a few stellar exercises that I'll share below. If you haven't yet downloaded your free 31 Days of Writing workbook from the subscriber portal, head on over there. You'll want to look at the following exercises to work with the objective correlative: Day 4, 5, and 6.
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Exercises from The Art of Fiction
4a: Describe a landscape as seen by an old woman whose disgusting and detestable old husband has just died. Do not mention the husband or death.
4b: Describe a lake as seen by a young man who has just committed murder. Do not mention the murder.
4c: Describe a landscape as seen by a bird. Do not mention the bird.
4d: Describe a building as seen by a man whose son has just been killed in a war. Do not mention the son, war, death, or the old man doing the seeing; then describe the same building, in the same weather and at the same time of day, as seen by a happy lover. Do not mention love or the loved one.
You know what to do: grab a notebook and start working on some of these exercises! They are so much fun and you'll really begin to see the results in terms of show, don't tell, and a rich, vivid quality to your words.
Yours in doing right by the miracle,
