...Five gold rings. It's been suggested that these gold rings represent the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament. Alternatively they may refer to the gold ring around a pheasant's neck – some think that the early verses of A Partridge in a Pear Tree are a reference to the custom of stuffing one bird inside another inside another for the Christmas feast. Perhaps the rings also symbolise the gift of gold brought by the three Kings to the baby Jesus. Who knows?
It's all a question of interpretation, which is a source of endless fascination in fiction, where stories function on a number of different levels, each one accessible to different people in different ways. The act of interpretation is what connects the reader to the writer, It is an active process of enquiry. The trick for you as an author is to ensure that your work remains just elusive enough for the reader to have to work on it with their own imagination in order to experience it properly. If you do everything for them they will only engage with it in a passive way. If you make them do some of the work themselves, checking that two plus two really does equal four and not five as the plot seems to suggest, they will become actively immersed in the world you have created. There should be a sense of open-ended enigma in your narrative. This can be expressed through the unfolding of the plot, or by a character not being all that they seem, or in any number of other ways. Think of writing as a form of flirtation with your audience, promise and withhold, spurn and cajole, leave them in a state of creative uncertainty...
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