Drawing on the Power of Resonance in Writing (3 page)

My own fantasy novels have covers by Da
rrell 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 u
p 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
,
“W
hy
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. R
eading 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 lik
e 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 other
s
.
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
work
s
.

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
, s
ometimes 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.

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 appropriate 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
.

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
an
other 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 ca
n 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
write
s
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