Drawing on the Power of Resonance in Writing Read online

  In short, almost every child in the world would find that Harry’s experiences at Hogwarts resonated with their own life.

  Resonance with Emotional Needs

  We often choose the genre of fiction that we do because we are seeking to create a positive emotional experience.

  The primary emotional draw of a book is so powerful that bookstores and libraries tend to arrange their shelves according to the emotion that the book arouses. Stores typically have shelves for “Romance,” “Drama,” “Mystery,” “Horror,” “Adventure,” “Humor” and so on.

  We could do a better job of arranging the books if we carried the practice further. One wise editor in the 1950s struggled to get fantasy and science fiction categorized as “wonder” literature in bookstores and libraries, since both genres promise to fulfill the same emotional need of wonder for readers.

  Communicating Resonance to an Audience

  When I worked in Hollywood, directors would often seek to have their works resonate with the monumental works in their field. They might say, “For this scene, I want a cool castle—sort of like Disney’s palace, but not quite the same.” They wanted the viewer to feel a connection, but not recognize that too consciously.

  There are dozens of ways to create resonance. Let’s go over just a few.

  Cover art.

  One of the first things that draws a reader into a story is the cover. If you pick up a romance novel, you want a picture that suggests romance—perhaps a man and woman hugging. If you want horror, something dark and sinister might be more apropos.

  My own fantasy novels have covers by Darrell Sweet and look like other fantasy novels—with medieval characters on the cover, along with a few monsters. Sweet of course is famous for painting book covers for Terry Brooks and Robert Jordan, two of our best-sellers of all time.

  So when readers look at my novels, they are immediately reminded of books by those authors. Now, do I write like either of them? Not much. I write epic fantasy in a medieval setting, but I don’t have a lot of the Tokienesque trappings that Brooks and Jordan have. Still, readers who like the work of these bestselling authors are likely to pick up my books based upon the style of the cover art.

  Once, I heard Darrell Sweet mention that one of his books, Ogre, Ogre, had outsold all others. So when writing my novel Wizardborn, I put in a scene that would resonate with a part of Ogre, Ogre. Sweet picked up on it and created the exact scene that I wanted—and the book quickly became a bestseller.

  Story Title

  Resonance in titles is so important, that at one time it was considered “a must” for a mainstream writer to try to find something that would resonate with a reader’s wider experience. Titles taken from the bible were popular. Thus, Hemingway once read through the bible more than once looking for a title that bible readers would be familiar with. It wasn’t until one of his friends, John Steinbeck, recommended the passage “the sun also rises upon the just and the unjust” that Hemingway found his title.

  Some authors go to absurd lengths to find titles that resonate for readers. When I was young I loved the book The Swiss Family Robinson. But even at the age of twelve I had to wonder, “Why was a Swiss family named Robinson?”

  Even as a child I knew that the appendage “son” is commonly used by Danes, not the Swiss. It wasn’t until a few years later that I realized that the writer was trying to use resonance to draw upon another book about a famous castaway, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which is often regarded as the first novel in the English language. Reading it would have been a must for every English schoolboy in the 1800s. The name “Robinson” had resonance. In fact, when Wyss wrote the book in German, the family was not named Robinson. The title of the novel Der Schweizerische Robinson actually translates to “The Swiss Robinson,” implying that it is a Swiss “Robinson Crusoe” story. English publishers later gave the family the surname Robinson in order to capitalize on the use of resonance.

  Settings

  Interestingly, one hallmark of a bestseller is that it must transport the reader to another time and place. If you look at the bestselling movies and books of all time, every one of them takes the audience someplace special.

  But the audience must want to be transported to that place. You have to find a “where and when” that people would like to go. Most people, for example, wouldn’t want to go to a prison ship in 1744. A story about a young slave falling in love on such a ship wouldn’t do well. The setting is heartbreaking.

  So readers prefer to be transported to “sexy” settings, as the legendary agent Albert Zuckerman puts it in Writing the Blockbuster Novel. Thus we have romance readers who may like to read books set only in Ireland, or during the Civil War, or on faraway planets.

  So romance writers may do well if they set their novels in, say, historic England in 1800, but the same story set in North Carolina in that very same year, using characters with the very same names, and even the same incidents and descriptions would be a flop.

  Motifs

  Many times the resonance in a tale is based upon only a certain motif—the use of dragons or ghosts or zombies.

  Similarly, we have plotting elements that are often resonant—wars, heists, escapes, hunts, and so on.

  Characters

  Sometimes a character in a story will resonate with others that we have known and loved. Authors may try to resonate with famous fictional characters, such as a plucky teen like Pollyanna, or a miser like Scrooge.

  I have known authors who will populate their novels with movie stars in an effort to create some resonance. Thus, a detective named Daniel Stark may look and speak just like Jack Nicholson. Or maybe a baseball player might look like Tom Cruise. Fans who recognize what the author is doing really find it delightful, since they can more easily imagine the characters. So authors may try to resonate with famous actors.

  A similar thing happens when I as a writer do a movie tie-in. With my Star Wars novels, many young readers wrote fan letters telling me how well I had brought the characters to life. It was easy to do—after watching the movies a couple of dozen times.

  Series writers will often use the same character as a detective over and over. Thus, if you loved Sherlock Holmes in one novel, you may be eager to read about him in another. The same principle applies to some other powerful adventure characters—Tarzan, Conan, James Bond and many others. In short, a novel or a series of novels may have what we call “internal resonance,” where parts of the story resonate with the writer’s own past works.

  However, some types of books don’t adapt well to a series. With romances, once a couple falls in love, you can’t really re-tell their love story successfully. Having them break up and then get back together isn’t as fun as the original story.

  Shared Experience

  As I mentioned earlier, sometimes the resonance in a novel comes from experiences that the author and purchaser have in common. Authors are often told to “Write what you know.” If you’ve worked in the military, you can probably write well enough about it so that it will resonate with others who have shared your experiences. If you’ve gone through a divorce, you can touch other readers more easily, and so on.

  Nostalgic experiences can be almost magical. The movie A Christmas Story worked well because it played upon experiences that many of us have lived through. I remember wanting a Red Ryder BB gun when I was a kid, and as a toddler, I had to wear a coat that would never let me put my arms down.

  Weaving it all Together

  Most of the time, in any given paragraph, you as an author load your work with so much resonance, touch so many strings of human experience, that it becomes difficult to untangle them all.

  You may be writing about a character similar to heroes from other novels and set the story in an England as viewed through your own experiences visiting five years ago. In writing about a war, you might draw upon conflicts found in famous battles and upon your own experience in losing a friend in a war. You might use language that feels appr
opriate to the time and place, seeking out imagery from famous painting for inspiration.

  The beauty of this is that you do it subconsciously. Your readers of course are almost always unaware of what you’re doing, but you create a comfortable tale for your reader and create confidence in your abilities as a writer, by resonating with the rest of literature and with life in general.

  A Case Study in Using Resonance: Tolkien

  I’d like to show how one great writer wowed an audience using resonance. Let’s use J.R.R. Tolkien as an example. Books and movies based on his works are widely popular, so you’re probably familiar with them.

  But there is another reason that I would like to use him as an example. A few years ago I was at a conference where a renowned writer dismissed Tolkien’s work as a “literary trick.” I’ve heard other critics occasionally take swipes at him, claiming that his work is juvenile and has little merit. Now, I’m not going to claim that he was the world’s greatest stylist, and I can certainly see weaknesses in his writing, but I believe that such comments are . . . uninformed.

  Often when we talk about a writer who is a great stylist, we say that he has “fine literary sensibilities.” In other words, he recognizes what sounds beautiful and what does not, and so he brings his story to life with grace and power.

  Of course by saying that, it suggests that few writers have fine sensibilities.

  But the truth is that most of us have fine sensibilities in one area or another. Orson Scott Card has a phenomenal ear for dialogue. Shannon Hale writes metaphors that leave me breathless. Brandon Sanderson has an unfailing sense of pacing. Steven King has been praised for being a modern Shakespeare when it comes to imitating the voice of the common man.

  So most well-known authors have a major strength. With Tolkien, when it comes to an understanding of and the use of resonance, he may have had few equals in all of literature. He not only used resonance in all of the ways that I spoke about above—he discovered new methods that no one else had ever considered. His personal sensibilities were acutely focused on how a work resonated.

  I read Lord of the Rings as a teenager and felt overwhelmed by its power and originality. Now I have to warn you that this article will be a spoiler, and by the time that you’re done reading it, you may lose some respect for Tolkien’s “originality.”

  I hope that you don’t lose respect. Tolkien drew inspiration from not just hundreds, but thousands of sources, and it is beyond the scope of what I’m doing here to detail all of them. In fact, I’m sure that I would fail in any such attempt. I’m only trying to give you a sense for what he is doing, to scratch the surface of his work

  Before I begin, it’s important for you to know that Tolkien was a master philologist (lover of words), and his first civilian job after WWI was to work on the Oxford English Dictionary, researching the roots of Germanic words. (For those who are not familiar with the Oxford English Dictionary, it is the most exhaustive of English dictionaries in that it discusses in detail, not only the meanings of words, but their history, usage, and etymology. When I talk about the Oxford English Dictionary, I am not referring to the condensed volume you sometimes see in stores. The last published Oxford English Dictionary was 20 volumes long.)

  Echoing Other Works: Der Ring des Nibelung and The Lord of the Rings

  The book “Lord of the Rings” echoes the title of Wagner’s classic German opera Der Ring des Nibelung, which is best translated as “Nibelung’s Ring.” The two tales have some similarities. From Wikipedia, here is a brief synopsis of the opera:

  The plot revolves around a magic ring that grants the power to rule the world, forged by the Nibelung dwarf Alberich from gold he stole from the Rhine maidens in the river Rhine. With the assistance of Loge, Wotan — the chief of the gods — steals the Ring from Alberich, but is forced to hand it over to the giants, Fafner and Fasolt. Wotan's schemes to regain the Ring, spanning generations, drive much of the action in the story. His grandson, the mortal Siegfried, wins the ring — as Wotan intended — but is eventually betrayed and slain as a result of the intrigues of Alberich's son Hagen. Finally, the Valkyrie Brünnhilde — Siegfried's lover and Wotan's estranged daughter — returns the ring to the Rhine maidens. In the process, the gods and their home, Valhalla, are destroyed.

  Does it sound at all familiar? In The Lord of the Rings, the One Ring is forged of gold and gives the wielder the power to rule the world. The character of Wotan appears in LOTR in the guise of Gandalf. In both tales, the ringbearer is repeatedly referred to as the “Lord of the Ring.” Many people struggle to gain the ring, and eventually, instead of casting it into a river (a plan that Frodo suggests), it is thrown into the Crack of Doom.

  So plot-wise there are a number of similar elements between the two works. Upon reading The Lord of the Rings, one might be tempted to conclude that the One Ring is an allegory for the nuclear bomb. Both, it would seem, are an ultimate weapon. And Tolkien’s use of a quest to destroy the Ring certainly mirrors many a person’s desire to rid the world of this “ultimate weapon.”

  But Tolkien wasn’t writing an allegory about the A-bomb—at least not consciously. He was familiar with war, having fought in WWI, and I’m sure that he knew that in every war, there is a new ultimate weapon, whether it be the fighter planes of WWI, or the underwater mines of the Crimean War—it is all the same. In the 1100s it was the trebuchet and the crossbow. Every war brings its new horrors, and the Ring that represented those horrors is based upon sources lost in antiquity.

  While the story form itself was probably inspired by the opera (or by one of the German sagas that inspired the opera), both stories also share a lead character—the Norse god Odin (or Wotan), a god of wisdom, war, and travel. Odin of course is often depicted as a man robed for travel with a walking stick and a long gray beard, and among the Roman pantheon he is equated with the god Mercury. There is no doubt that the two were one and the same god. There is also little doubt that Gandalf is modeled on Odin—a wise traveler who is also a master of war. In fact, here is the artist George von Rosen’s 1886 depiction of Odin.

  No one who has seen the movies or other representations of Gandalf can fail to recognize that he and Odin are one and the same. Yet sometimes even the author doesn’t recognize the source of a character that he creates. For example, Tolkien once found an old postcard from Germany in his belongings and wrote on the back of it that the postcard—which showed an old wizard feeding a deer—served as inspiration for Gandalf.

  But critics have shown that it couldn’t have served as inspiration. Tolkien had actually created Gandalf several years before he saw the postcard. I suspect that instead, Rosen’s picture of Odin, shown here, served as Tolkien’s inspiration for Gandalf.

  The similarities between the characters can be seen in the design of Gandalf—who is shown wearing Mercury’s traditional gray traveling robe and peaked cap in the image below—from the film.

  Resonance with Names

  Years ago, a friend who owned a video game company called me and said, “Dave, I have a problem. We’ve made this great fantasy videogame, but we don’t have a name for our hero. I’ve been going over names with my staff for days, and we’re stuck. How do you name a fantasy character?”

  “That’s easy,” I said. “You take two words that come to mind to describe that character, then put them together, and consider their sounds to make sure that they resonate properly.”

  I then asked him to describe the character in five or six words, and I spat out a name. My friend was silent for a moment, and then said, “That’s perfect. That’s perfect! We’ve been beating our heads against a wall for weeks, and you come up with the name in ten seconds. Tell me again how you do that?”

  I can’t even recall the name, but I met the friend a few weeks ago, and he reminded me of the incident. So I’ll try to make this process a little clearer.

  A classic example of this might be seen in George Lucas’s use of the name Darth Vader. “Darth” is probably a cont
raction of “dark” and “death,” or it might be a modification of “dearth.” “Vader” could be a truncation of “invader,” or it could simply be Dutch (vader) for “father.” Hence, I’m fairly certain that it is inspired by the words “dark,” “death,” “invader” and “father.” But by happy coincidence, it resonates with other dire-sounding words as well.

  Similarly, Tolkien used these techniques in creating names. Some of his names are easily untangled. Treebeard is an ancient tree with a lichen-like beard. Mount Doom doesn’t need to be untangled at all. Mordor, the name of the evil kingdom where Sauron dwells, sounds like “murder,” but of course “more” and “door,” the two words that make up the name, suggest that by entering this place, you might be walking through a door into murder.

  However, Tolkien complicates what Lucas did by using names that often have foreign roots. Remember that Tolkien was a philologist, one of the world’s foremost authorities on the origins of words with Germanic roots. He was very familiar with old German, Norse, Danish, English, and so on.