Sorry about the late reply, I often take an internet holiday over the weekend.

But assuming that you mean that "things we believe are symbolism" in an authors work are generally constructed deliberately, I would be very interested in seeing any kind of attempt to quantify how often literature critics gets it right, by e.g. having them analyse works where authors have confirmed their intent.

I'm going to demur a little on 'things we believe...'. You are right of course about the aspect of deliberation, but there are two other possibilities besides critics simply being wrong: one, that symbols originate with the author but the author isn't conscious of them, and two that symbols don't originate with the author at all(perhaps because they appear to reference things that didn't exist at the time the story was written) but nevertheless offer an interesting new perspective on a work.

Modern critics are not much concerned with objective truths about 'what the author meant' so much as teasing apart the construction of meaning in readers' minds. MY understanding is that this approach became more prominent after the french critic Roland Barthes appeared on the scene and suggested that there might be no limit to the possibilities of interpretation, followed by Foucault suggesting there might not be such a thing as authorship (I'm oversimplifying to the point of absurdity here, mind). One the one hand I have a problem with this approach as a writer, because I do try to construct meaning and I am not enthused about some jumped-up critic who has never attempted any fiction coming along and expounding on 'what it really means' - I frequently find myself reading books of criticism and muttering 'so-and-so is still alive - why not just ask the author about intention?' Then again it's easy to find examples of cultural and symbolic material being assigned new meanings that came to overshadow the original intended ones. Famous examples would be Hitler's appropriation of the Swastika to represent the Nazi party, turning an Asian symbol of good luck and harmony into one of terror and oppression, or the ongoing game in American politics of claiming that 'the founders intended' this or that outcome of a Constitutional dispute. For politicians, what the author intended by something is of distinctly secondary importance compared to what the public can be made to believe was intended, and so (critics argue) we need to consider how works can be understood as well as how they were intended.

And when I write, I don't think about symbols at all, generally. If I do see something that stands out as likely to be interpreted as symbolism, I'd generally remove it, as I find it trite and annoying. Your anecdote is interesting enough, but you can't extrapolate from that to tell us anything about how often people intentionally adds symbols vs. simply intend to e.g. convey images without thinking about how people might try to analyse it to death.

For sure. I'm just trying to give one example of how symbols can be used. I used to be resistant to this approach to symbolization myself and wrote in pursuit of a more messy realism that rejected such abstractions, but eventually I noticed that the more abstract symbolic stuff was what I actually related to emotionally and accepted that I valued a lot of art more for its emotional and symbolic qualities than for its intellectual or mechanical ones.

Or it was what the author knew how to describe. Or the author likes book stores. Or the author wanted to add in a point about the death of small book stores (personally I'm far more partial to the idea that script writer was being literal and straight forward than what you suggest, but I have no specific basis for this interpretation either). Or (and I have no idea, so I'm just throwing out possibilities here) Meg Ryan was tied to the project from early on and the script writer just happened to think she'd fit well as a book store owner. The options were already limited if wanting to stay realistic once the premise of "owner of small local business falls for big chain guy" was set (e.g. equine accessories was never an option; produce could have been).

To me, absent additional knowledge of what the script writer intended, your suggestion is already well into over-interpretation.

Again I would have been firmly in your camp a few years back. Indeed, having worked for a decade in film, I've seen a lot of projects where the semantic content was subordinated to logistics, eg a story being set in a prison rather than a military base because we couldn't afford to rent a location and proprs for a convincing military base, but there was a disused jail going cheap and we made some last minute story adjustments. That's not such an issue for a big budget film but for small budget films of the sort I work on it happens all the time.

However! I also believe in a phenomenological approach to art, ie that when you encounter a piece of art the impression that it makes on you is the most important thing, unmediated by any critic's interpretation, artist's statement, or even knowledge of the artist's identity. To me the essence of good art is that it compels engagement somehow. So for example, I intensely dislike the paintings of Francis Bacon but I think he's a great artist because I feel compelled to engage with them; somehow he's managed to bypass my preferential filters in order to communicate something I find unpleasant but truthful. I certainly don't want to have a discussion with an art critic about his work because while I find it distressing to look at, that experience of distress is something I wish to explore and understand within myself rather than domesticate by locating it within a critical framework - I'm not so interested in understanding Francis Bacon as I am my reaction to his work. Of course over time I have become a bit interested in Bacon himself, but I think it's important not to lose sight of that first impression, when you see, hear, or read something the first time without any clear cultural context.

So for me the value of criticism is (increasingly) not about answering the question of 'what is this art about' or 'what does this artist mean' but rather 'how do people engage with art' or 'how do we construct meaning', which I suppose reflects a personal slide from Platonism to existentialism.