Drawing on the Power of Resonance in Writing Read online

  A couple of years ago, I went out to sell books at the fair. I had dozens of books on display, and some of them have been around for years, but this was the first time that I’d ever been able to sit in front of buyers and get their reactions to the books. Frequently I had teens grab a Runelords book and say, “Oh, this is what dad likes.” Sometimes they even knew which book he’d read, but many of them would then look at the books a bit confusedly and then say, “Oh, no, this just looks like them.” Invariably the dad was either a reader of Terry Brooks or Robert Jordan, and the teen had simply recognized the style of the cover art. Yet in most cases, after realizing that I wasn’t Brooks or Jordan, the wife would pick up one of my books anyway. Why? Resonance. My book looked like the kind that her husband might like.

  In other cases, moms would grab book five in the series and say, “Has Jaden read this one yet?” The book pictures a young man on a graak, a dragon-like creature; it turns out that there are a lot of Jadens out there who only like to read books about dragons. Once again, resonance.

  If you ask a person who describes himself as a “big science fiction and fantasy fan” what he likes to read, you will almost always find that his tastes are rather narrow. They’ll tell you, “I like J.K. Rowling” or “I love Orson Scott Card.” In short, they have a favorite author in the genre but haven’t read beyond that author. Or maybe they’ve read widely in a certain franchise—Dragonlance or Star Wars. Resonance.

  So the question in my mind is, just how many people buy books because they resonate with other works, and how many actually buy for novelty?

  Take a look at the fantasy and science fiction market. The fantasy market is much larger than the science fiction market. I can’t say how much larger for sure, but years ago I was told by industry professionals that fantasy appeared to be outselling science fiction by about six to one. In the years since, science fiction sales have dropped dramatically. I suspect that fantasy outsells science fiction by more than ten to one.

  But forty years ago there was no “fantasy” market. There was no section in the bookstores that said “fantasy” anywhere. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings became something of a cult hit in the 1960s and grew into the 1970s. It wasn’t until 1977, when Terry Brooks came out with The Sword of Shannara that a fantasy novel hit The New York Times Bestseller list, and Brooks stayed on top of the list for five months. That is when fantasy as a “genre” was born.

  Sure, there had been fantasy novels before. Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories began appearing in the early 1930s, along with the work of Fritz Lieber and others, and these surely had an influence on Tolkien. But most of those early works were printed in magazines, and there were not sections yet devoted to the “fantasy” genre.

  But once Terry Brooks hit the big time, publishers began to respond to a perceived demand for fantasy.

  Of course a lot of things got shelved with the fantasy, but the most commercially successful works were those that best imitated Tolkien. These are usually stories set in 1) a medieval setting, 2) with a small cast of people traveling on a quest, 3) in a world populated by several species of intelligent humanoids, including wizards, and so on.

  Examples of this include works by Brooks, Jordan, Weiss and Hickman, etc.—who have been, by the way, the most commercially successful writers in the fantasy genre until just recently.

  One quote, from The New York Times, on Robert Jordan’s novels says “Jordan has come to dominate the world Tolkien began to reveal.” And that is true. Of the fantasy writers of the past 15 years, Jordan has been most successful, selling literally millions of copies. But if you look closely at the first hundred pages of Eye of the World, you will see dozens (even hundreds, if you want to get nit-picky) of parallels between Jordan’s work and Tolkien’s.

  The parallels start when you open the book. Before each story begins, we see a map. Tolkien’s map shows his world, Middle-earth, “at the end of the third age.” Jordan’s novel has a map with a strikingly similar coast line, and at the end of Jordan’s brief and powerful prologue, we see that he quotes historians from “the Fourth Age.” There are other similarities in the maps. Tolkien has his Mount Doom, while Jordan has his Mountains of Dhoom. Tolkien talks of his Misty Mountains, Jordan has (on his second map) the Mountains of Mist.

  In both novels, we begin with a celebration. In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien’s Hobbits plan to celebrate a birthday party. Jordan’s characters plan to celebrate Bel Tine.

  In The Lord of the Rings, the wizard Gandalf plans to make an unusual appearance and sets off fireworks. In Jordan’s novel, wizards make an unusual appearance in town and thus add to the spectacle of the planned fireworks.

  In The Lord of the Rings, our hero is a young man, a rustic gentleman farmer, who barely escapes his home with three companions when the Dark Riders begin their hunt. With Jordan, our hero is a young man, a poor farmer, who barely escapes his home with three companions when trollocs attack. (Note that in Tolkien’s world we have trolls, in Jordan’s we have trollocs.)

  Now, I could go on for pages like this, dissecting sentences to show how Jordan is establishing resonance with Tolkien, Howard, Arthurian legend, and so on. Yet I feel like I’ve done enough of that. Rather, I’d like to get to the point of what I’m trying to say: Robert Jordan is a very fine and powerful writer in his own right. He could have created his own fantasy world, populated it with creatures from his own imagination, and given us something new. But he recognized that there was a vast audience out there who was still looking for something that resonated deeply with Tolkien’s work, and he made the choice to capture that existing audience rather than write in the hope that he might gather his own fans independently.

  The truth is that if you write something startlingly original, it is very difficult to sell. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings went to dozens of publishers before it found a home, yet now if you look at most polls by fantasy readers, it is considered the greatest fantasy of all time.

  Similarly, in science fiction, the novel Dune is now considered by most readers to be the best Science Fiction novel ever written—but Frank Herbert went through every publisher in New York before a magazine company decided to give it a shot.

  If you try to create and sell a truly original fantasy, publishers won’t know what to do with it. So let’s say you write about creatures that you call “Golunds.” Your protagonist has three legs and two heads. He lives in a land called Neuropa, and his great conflict is that he hopes to find love in a land where all solicitations for affection are outlawed. You send your masterpiece into a publisher and manage to hook an editor. They love it. “What shelf should we put it on?” they’ll ask. “How do we market it? What other bestseller is it most like?” If you answer, “It’s totally different!” they will not be happy. In fact, it will never make it past the marketing board.

  So as a writer, you need to consider, “What other works will my book resonate with?”

  One way to do this is to aim a book right down the reader’s throat. Look at the age of your target audience, and ask yourself, “What works have most influenced my audience?”

  Let’s say you’re writing to a young teen audience. You might decide that the huge blockbuster movies of the past decade have been Harry Potter; The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; Pirates of the Caribbean; Shrek; Spiderman, and so on. You can then look at television—Heroes, Buffy, Spongebob. You might go on to consider videogames, popular music, and the effect that the twin towers has had on the life of a person growing up today.

  In short, as you write, you need to be aware of what your reader has probably been influenced by, and then consider whether or not you want to change what you’d like to write in order to better reach a large potential audience.

  Resonance Outside of Tolkien

  It may sound as if I’ve been pretty exhaustive in my dissecting of Tolkien, but I’ve hardly touched the surface.

  Masters at the use of resonance make it a life study.

  If you t
ake any major motion picture and study it closely, you will most likely see how it resonates.

  For example, if you watch the movie Avatar, you can see plot devices that make it feel like Dances with Wolves meets Fern Gully. Portions of the plot seem to be drawn from a short story by Poul Anderson. Images from the film echo other science fiction movies—from Alien, to Star Trek, to 2001: A Space Odyssey, and so on. A couple of characters created for the movie look suspiciously similar to characters from popular videogames. Lines from Avatar draw from President George Bush and from the movie the Terminator.

  If we studied the music, dialog, plotline, ship design, clothing design, and imagery frame-by-frame, we could see how this film ties into dozens of other major franchises.

  Was any of it by accident? No. The best writers and directors are painfully conscious about the works that they’re struggling to resonate with. They’re aware that every piece of literature is part of a greater field of art, and that artists communicate to the world across the generations by joining that conversation.

  Recently, I showed some of my students the animated Disney film Tangled, and we studied how animators had made it resonate with dozens of other films, many within Disney’s own franchises. In some ways, animated films—which one might imagine would be the simplest forms of entertainment—can become more complex and self-conscious than works in just about any medium.

  Resonance and You

  At this point some readers may feel like I’m telling them all to write like Tolkien, to master the use of resonance down to the level of the ceneme. In actuality, I don’t think you need to try to write just like Tolkien—or anyone else.

  The truth is that when we try to “create” stories, generally we are simply combining rather common elements. In other words, your story will draw upon the power of resonance whether you mean for it to or not. You’ll combine elements that you love from other arts, from other works, and other lives in order to create something extraordinary.

  For this reason, I sometimes suggest that authors try to “marry” uncommon elements. Years ago, one of my young students, Stephenie Meyer, asked “How do I become the bestselling young adult writer of all time.” So we began discussing what her story would be about—a tale that brought together a sense of wonder and romance. As she talked, she sparked ideas on where she might go with this, speaking about her home in Forks, Washington and vampires in the woods. I recall it vividly because I had lived in such a forest in Oregon about ten years earlier, and I realized that, “Yes, it would be a perfect place for vampires.” Her ideas seemed to be vague still, unformed. I warned her that it might be hard to sell such a novel at that time. Major publishers didn’t have any lines for contemporary teen fantasy, and even though a romance made sense from a greenlighting aspect, publishers who’d never printed such books might not back it, but I suspected that with the rise of Harry Potter’s popularity, the major publishers might be looking for something like Stephenie’s books in a few years.

  Like many authors, Stephenie’s world came together in a vivid dream, and she was able to jump into the project at just the right time. She created a work that resonated with many other things—the works of Anne Rice, the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and of course it resonated with Stephenie’s own life and the experiences of any teen who goes to a new school.

  So dig deep into your own personal experiences, but also learn to tap into cultural phenomenon—into myths, religion, global politics, major motion pictures and books, and even internet memes in order to establish resonance. Draw from the whole of your life, and from the rest of the world.

  Where Resonance Goes Wrong

  You can’t get rid of resonance. Your personal tastes are going to be influenced by the stories that you’ve loved the most. So don’t ever try to be “completely” original. It’s a good way to go mad.

  I’m reminded of Larry Niven. A critic once talked to him about his bestselling novel Ringworld, pointing out that it had strong ties in its plot line to The Wizard of Oz. Larry, who is a genius by any standard, was floored. He said, “I suddenly realized that I had read The Wizard of Oz hundreds of times as a child. I loved it. Of course, I couldn’t help the fact that it helped form my fiction.”

  Because Niven was drawing upon a popular source for inspiration, it probably helped him to find a large audience.

  But let’s say that he hadn’t. What if, as a child, Larry Niven had fallen in love with a terribly obscure tale. Let’s make up one. We’ll call it “How Pollywog Lost his Tail.” It’s the story of a pollywog in a tiny pond. Day by day, the fierce sun beats down upon it, shrinking the pond. As he goes about feeding, he worries that he is going to die, and his tail shrinks. Yet as it shrinks, he finds that he begins to grow new hands and legs. Eventually, the pond dries up, and as the pollywog begins to die, his tail shrinks completely. The pollywog turns into a full-fledged frog, and uses his newfound powers to hop away.

  Instead of writing Ringworld, let’s say that Niven wrote a story about a young lizard man in a city. As city violence escalates, lizard-boy finds that his tail begins shrinking. Eventually, lizard-boy is on the verge of losing his life, when suddenly his “death fangs” grow in, and he gains super powers.

  Would the second tale resonate with a larger audience? Not at all. I’m not aware of any place in literature where humans celebrate the loss of body parts as they metamorph into adult creatures. So there hasn’t traditionally been an audience for this, and the new novel most likely would never find an audience.

  In other words, you can also go wrong by drawing upon obscure sources for your resonance. If you don’t develop mainstream tastes at any time of your life, it’s not likely that you’ll attract a mainstream audience.

  This doesn’t mean that you can’t have a career as an author. It just means that you’ll need to try to use your novelty and perhaps your own unique writing skills to create an audience.

  A similar thing happens if you don’t draw upon common cultural experiences in order to resonate with life. If your life was a novel—if you were raised by lions in Africa—you’re not going to be able to draw upon family life, school, and so on in order to create a bond between you and your audience.

  Have you ever noticed that very young authors, regardless of talent, can almost never connect to a vast audience? They haven’t lived enough, experienced enough, to do so. Given this, they almost always find that they connect with audiences that they do have something in common with—very young audiences.

  In Conclusion

  We have a vast reservoir of shared experience that helps us as people bond together.

  Some of that shared experience can be found in literature, in film, in movies, or in art. Other shared experiences come from our schooling, our workplace, our love of sports—our basic lifestyles.

  When you read a popular book or go to a major movie, you’re doing it with perhaps millions of other people. You might read a book and find that you enter a magical world, becoming another person for a while. Millions of others do it, too, and the experience changes you all, binds you together. If you’re a Star Trek fan, you might travel halfway around the world, meet someone wearing Spock ears in Korea, and instantly feel an affinity for that person. Societies are built around our shared moments.

  The truth is that you can’t write any tale without drawing upon that vast pool of shared experiences, but the wisest writers, those who become most popular, learn to draw upon art and literature in order to create works that speak to audiences more strongly, more deeply, and appeal to a wider network of readers.

  Learn to do draw upon other works consciously, and to do it well. Too often, authors are content to write “little” stories, tales that are so personal that the rest of the world just doesn’t relate.

  Remember, a great tale isn’t just about you. Ultimately, the reader should close your book and feel that a connection has been made, to realize with wonder and delight that “This story is about me.”

 
; Ways to Draw Upon Resonance

  If you’re a novelist, familiarize yourself with the bestselling novels in your genre. Are you trying to write children’s books? Then you should read The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland in order to get some historical perspective.

  In fact, as a writer you need to keep your finger on the pulse of your marketplace, studying all sorts of trends in fiction and fashion.

  I once worked with a writer in Hollywood to create a new fantasy franchise. The first thing that he did was ask for a list of other films in the genre that were influential. He then went out and rented movies—Conan the Barbarian, Willow, Ladyhawke—and dozens of others, then watched them over the course of several days in order to educate himself about the genre.

  Every novelist should do the same, familiarizing himself with popular books, movies, poems, music and other forms of popular art. Depending upon the genre, you may need to research history or videogames.

  Beyond other works of art, you need to look at real life. This might mean that you will want to draw from historical records when describing life in Chicago in 1920. You may be able to find old photographs, or read from local writers of the time in order to get a deeper feel for what you’re trying to create. You may want to study menus from restaurants in order to get a feel for the cuisine. In order to write about a wizard who used herbs once, I planted a garden with herbs that had historic uses—and then took took the herbs myself, in order to study their effects fist-hand.